In this powerful, debut collection, Rania Mamoun expertly blends the real and imagined to create a rich, complex and moving portrait of contemporary Sudan and illuminates the breadth of human experience and explores, with humour and compassion, the alienation, isolation and estrangement that is urban life.

Entering Constantine's stories is like stepping out into a gale of words, a swarm of language, his prose as fluid as the water that surges and swells through his landscapes. Yet his stories are able to stop time, to freeze-frame each protagonist's life at the moment when the past breaks the surface.

M John Harrison is a cartographer of the liminal; his work sits at the boundaries between genres - horror and science fiction, fantasy and travel writing - just as his stories traverse the no man's land between the spatial and the spiritual.