Stories

My short story ‘One o’Clock Spe­cial’ has been pub­lished in the Roads Ahead anthol­ogy from Tin­dal Street Press, which is avail­able to buy here.

The story is set at many one o’clocks, telling the tale of a flour­ish­ing rela­tion­ship between sin­gle mother Eliz­a­beth and dis­en­chanted mar­ried man Paul.

Roads Ahead is billed as a ‘10p mix-up’ edited by Cather­ine O’Flynn, author of What Was Lost, which won lots and lots and lots of plau­dits in 2007, and of The News Where You Are, which was released in Sum­mer 2010. The col­lec­tion includes sto­ries by Chris Smith, Kathryn Sim­monds, Chris Killen, Nick Walker and Luke Brown, along­side six­teen oth­ers and me. It is reviewed here and here. It is also a state­ment of intent from Tin­dal Street Press, a small inde­pen­dent pub­lisher based in Birm­ing­ham that has made a habit of plac­ing books on the Man Booker Prize longlist and shortlist.

roadsahead

Bonus online-only story

To accom­pany the pub­li­ca­tion of Roads Ahead, and as a hello-and-thank-you to any­one who’s got this far, I’m offer­ing an extra, related story.

‘Ten o’Clock’ can be down­loaded by click­ing here and enter­ing a pass­word. The pass­word is the first word the wait­ress says in ‘One o’Clock Spe­cial’, all in lower-case.

If you don’t yet have Roads Ahead, of course, you won’t yet have a pass­word. Per­haps instead you’d like to read the top-three let­ters from this web­site. These are:

  1. Famous first words — An over­heard con­ver­sa­tion from an obvi­ous first date.
  2. What makes a first mem­ory? — I think peo­ple click on this to read a blog from 1977.
  3. Song­wrongs (or education’s end) — A let­ter about gram­mat­i­cal errors in music.

So, hello. And thank you.