Lisa Blower

Here, 14 authors have been invited to work with key scientists to explore, through short fiction, various aspects of sleep research: from the possibilities of ‘sleep engineering’ and ‘overnight therapies’, to future-tech ways of harnessing sleep’s problem-solving powers, to the challenges posed by our increasingly 24-hour lifestyles.

One Monday afternoon, around three o'clock, pond supplies salesman Selwyn Robby arrives home towing the Toogood Aquatics exhibition caravan and orders his like-wife, Imogen 'Ginny' Dare, to get into the car. He's taking her on a little holiday, he says. To Wales. So begins their road trip west via ponds, pitstops, and blasts from Selwyn's past. But it's a fishy business towing this caravan with its saucy mermaid curtains, fully stocked bar, and the words 'For your pondlife and beyond' in the slanted red font favoured by Pound shops. And Ginny must untangle the pondweed to get to the bottom of it, even it does mean unearthing her own murky past to find out.

A love story in the slow lane about loss and getting lost-two childhood sweethearts take a trip via pints, ponds and pitstops to find their future on a road less travelled from Stoke-on-Trent to Wales.

This fabulous collection of her award-winning short stories is dominated by the working-class matriarch. From the wise, witty and outspoken Nan of ‘Broken Crockery’, who has lived and worked in Stoke-on-Trent for all of her 92 years, to happy hooker Ruthie in ‘The Land of Make Believe’, to sleep-deprived Laura in ‘The Trees in the Wood’, to young mum Roxanne in ‘The Cherry Tree’, she appears in many shapes and forms, and always with a stoicism that is hard to break down. Lisa Blower celebrates her characters with stories they wouldn’t want told. She makes the bleak funny, and brings to life the silent histories and harsh realities of those living on the margins. ‘It’s gone dark over Bill’s mother’s’ is a Potteries’ saying that means it’s looking a bit bleak, a little like rain. With origins as a footless and random as the barflies trying to find their meanings in ‘Happenstance’, it is an expression that sums up this fabulous collection.