My first collection of short stories, ‘Smorgasbord’, is being published by Deixis Press on the 29th October 2026. (I am so lucky to have found, in Angel Belsey, a publisher who is so supportive of her authors and who just does the right thing. Examples abound of writers being treated appallingly by publishing houses; you won’t find a single author with a single bad thing to say about Angel. Thanks again, Angel!). I must also say that several people commented on and thereby helped improve early versions of the tales in ‘Smorgasbord’; particular thanks must go to the very talented Melanie Whipman. 

The collection is called ‘Smorgasbord’ because it is a mixture of styles and content without any obvious unifying theme. The stories include some written over a decade ago, when I’d just started writing properly rather than only playing at it, and others written at various points since then. A few of them are set in Geneva; these touch on a number of the characters and mental dysfunction themes evident in ‘The Cartoon Life and Loves of a Stupid Man’. Others are set in Wales, America, Cambridge, India and Cornwall. With such disparate themes and settings, choosing meaningful cover art was always going to be a bit tricky. So I was very fortunate to find this wonderful local painter: Chantelle Watson. Not only does she do the most amazing things with colour, but many of her pictures are of areas in Cornwall which I know well, and which are close to the Cornish settings in ‘Smorgasbord’. Chantelle kindly permitted us to use one of her paintings for the book-cover, and here it is:

It’s also difficult to pick a representative excerpt when the stories differ from each other so much in style and content. Perhaps this, from ‘The Story of Great-Uncle George’, will do as a taster:

“We’d visit him quarterly, parking outside the residential block on a Sunday afternoon, pressing the front-door buzzer to beg access from bored staff, signing the visitors’ book, and filing down the
corridor past the over-heated rooms with their identical curtains and synthetic easy-clean carpets. “Assisted living?” my father would mutter. “More like assisted dying! The state of this place!” But my sister and I, all agog, noses wrinkling at the smells of institutional food and hand-sanitiser, took no notice; we’d come for the stories. The stories! For those, we forgave the old man his oddities: the way he perpetually sat as if glued to the stained armchair, the way he stared unsmilingly and unseeingly at some grubby wall or window or looked down at his hands and what they held. The way he would hardly glance at us, still less acknowledge our greetings. I now think that he saw his English family as reminders of a dispossession too painful to contemplate. Perhaps that was why he told such stories: to dress his life in more becoming clothes, to hide the scars and bruises . . .”