Neil Armstrong in North Somerset: And More Than 50 Other Short Tales for a Fast World

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Helvetica} A wonderful collection of `flash fiction' - stories typically of less than two pages. Including the Fish Flash Fiction prize-winning `Passing Over Paradise' - described by judge Chris Stewart as a "satisfyingly artful conceit." The visit of an astronaut to a Somerset pub, an Indian waiter struggling to live up to his review, a boy who is born without a heart, a man who waits for a taxi he knows will never come, a carpenter who seeks to profit from the fall of Troy. These are just some of the eccentric and poignant characters who inhabit these short, often very short, stories. David Gaffney, a master of the genre, describes a flash story as "a nimble, nippy little thing that could turn on a sixpence and accelerate quickly away". In this fine collection of `nimble nippy little things', Jack Lethbridge offers us succinct but satisfying stories designed for those with fast lives, offering us something to consume and contemplate in those short quiet spaces in otherwise frantic lives - a coffee break at work perhaps, or in the dentist's waiting room, sitting in a carwash, waiting for a pizza delivery. As Jack says in the introductory story, "let me share my voices with you, these lives on the winds that I listen to while I wait. Keep me company for a while, and we can listen together."