A novella and 12 short stories, which range over the following issues: the environment, pollution and its connection with male violence, state repression, class and race prejudice, power relations between men and women, existential matters of competing realities and the importance of intuition, and all forms of binary thinking. A young person pursued by dark forces escapes to a mountain, only to sense that they may not have escaped after all. A young couple trailed by their troubled pasts emerge from a tube station at the very moment a bomb is about to be detonated nearby. On a dark night a man and a woman leaving a tram station encounter in the lamplight a strange ethereal man who seems to encompass the history and the future of the place where they are standing. A young mother escaped from a flood sits cradling her newborn while a storm rages around her, and thinks of the premonition she had when she was a child. A once-idyllic country walk leads to a horrific farmyard scene, and a woman attending a funeral remembers a moment in an ancient stairwell when the past and the violent future spiralled around her. These are stories of people caught in a world in flux and possible peril, struggling with pollution and prejudice, with male violence and state repression, and above all with the challenge to their own sense of reality. It is a world in which global forces bear down on the deepest, most emotional aspects of peoples lives, but where hope and humanity can survive, and the belief in alternative possibilities can triumph.
