A. L. Kennedy

Offers a collection of short stories that show us exactly what becomes of the broken-hearted. This title reveals the sadness, violence, hurt and terror, and also the redemption and the love.

Funny and moving, wise and sad, this "imaginative tour de force" (The San Diego Union-Tribune) charts the intensity and courage found in a former World War II POW as he looks back on the closeness of death, from one of Britain's most iconoclastic and highly acclaimed young writers. Alfie Day, RAF airman and former World War II POW, never expected to survive the war. Now, five years later and more alone than ever, Alfie finds himself drawn to unearth those strange, passionate days by working as an extra on a POW film. What he will discover on the set about himself, his loves and the world around him will make the war itself look simple.

Alfred Day wanted his war. he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew, and - most extraordinary of all - he found Joyce, a woman to love. Maybe it took him, too. Now in 1949, employed as an extra in a war film that echoes his real experience, Day begins to recall what he would rather forget...

"Nathan Staples is a man in pain, consumed by loathing and love in roughly equal measures. Frustrated and appalled by his life and the way he lives it, he is sustained only by his passionate devotion to his estranged wife, Maura, and their teenage daughter, Mary - whom he hasn't seen in fifteen years, and who thinks he's dead. When Nathan contrives to have Mary invited to the island where he lives in retreat, he sets in motion the possibility of telling her he is her father, and of becoming whole and complete and alive again." "The path to grace, though, is strewn with obstacles and challenges. The obsessive island dwellers are trying to cure themselves through trial by extremity while, over in London, Nathan's editor, only friend and one link with his literary career - the brilliant, loyal, hopeless Jack - is drinking himself into the ground. And Mary is torn emotionally between familial love for the two uncles who brought her up in loco parentis and the beginnings of a romantic, sexual life beyond."--BOOK JACKET.

Bullfighting - the ultimate spectator sport. Acclaimed novelist A. L. Kennedy unpeels the layers and explains the mechanics before dissecting them with surgical precision. Beyond the theatre, the costume and the well-worn plot she focuses on the fact that a man faces his death while a crowd looks on. The result is a startling confrontation with her own, and mankind's, mortality.