We first meet our narrator Rose as she is arrested in the 1990’s while studying at university. She’s met a fellow student called Harlow who announces her appearance on the scene with a whirlwind explosion of noise and anarchy. Dragging Rose into her escapades, she seems to neatly fit a hole in Rose’s life left by long disappeared sister, Fern. Rose and Fern were brought up by their parents as a sort of home experiment by their psychologist father, and the repercussions of that experimentation […]

John is the pupil of the famous philosopher Roger Bacon, trained in the arts of linguistics, medicine and a variety of other sciences. Evidently worried about being accused of heresy, Bacon entrusts a book containing all known knowledge at the time to the young man and secretly sets him off on a pilgrimage to the Pope to demonstrate his master’s knowledge, accompanied by two other fledgling friars he vaguely knows. On this eventful trip he gets to know his two companions, is repeatedly robbed, is […]

Tom Keely is a collapsed wreck of a man. A disgraced and rejected environmental activist, he now spends his days drunk in his high-rise flat, venturing outside only for a quick stagger to the shops for ballast and a shot of coffee from a sympathetic café owner, before making his paranoid and unsteady way back. Divorced from both his wife and the world, Keely has all but given up on the country and himself until he comes into contact with a childhood acquaintance Gemma and […]