Rebecca Lloyd’s first published collection of six­teen strange stories, nine of which are previously unpublished, is made up of tales of unease with a sprinkling of the ghostly, menacing and fantastical. The stories inhabit the fragile space between fantasy and reality, where the landscape is in constant flux and things are not quite as they seem. In ‘Mercy’ a loving husband finds an un­usual method of prolonging his affec­tion for his wife, while the inhabitant of a halfway house finds a creative use for internet dating in ‘Salsa’. Alan runs away from the circus in ‘The Lover’, and in ‘The Reunion’, eccentric and elderly Isobel and Charles, struggling with the upkeep of their de­caying mans­ion, chose an entirely new way to face the future. In ‘Maynard’s Moun­tain’, the search for a lost lottery ticket involves a traveller family in a (literally) uphill task. Contents: ‘Mercy’, ‘The Careless Hour’, ‘The Stone’, ‘Salsa’, ‘The Meat Freezer’, ‘Dust’, ‘What Comes?’, ‘Momentum’, ‘Lucky Cat’, ‘The Bath’, ‘The Gathering’, ‘Gone to the Deep’, ‘Maynard’s Mountain’, ‘The Lover’, ‘All That Follows’, The Reunion’..