Barcelona to Bihar

A collection that ducks and dives through time and space with the speed of a social network site browser. The opening story, 'Reading Tolstoy in Barcelona' by Peter Deadman, presents a young merchant sailor getting to grips with the world via some extraordinary midnight shore-leave encounters. It sets the scene perfectly for a series of tales of immigrants and migrants, of misfits and visitors, from every corner of the world. Opening time at a shop in India, and nemesis arrives in the shape of a genial stray. In Britain, sons and daughters of immigrants seek ways of being British, whilst the indigenous Brits find the familiar - from office party to lighthouse beam - is not what it ought to be. Taking in letters from Africa, from the Solomon Islands and from previous centuries; witnessing potentially murderous mountaintop encounters with goats and even trolls; navigating a European tunnel and an English bell tower, the mind of the reader must twist and turn, encompassing many miles and many moods, before coming home with a view from another planet as to what it might mean to be human.