B. Catling

"There hadn't been monks at the abbey since 1600. Not living ones, that is." When the puckish spirit of a monk begins haunting the storied village of Pulborough, known for its ancient abbey, Maud Garner, manager of the Coach and Horses Inn, arranges for the famous ghost hunter, Walter Prince, to come investigate. And from there, things spiral out of control. Peopled with richly drawn Dickensian grotesques and filled with bizarre and comical incident, Munky is as compelling as it is antic. Catling transports the reader to an interwar England in the throes of change. Part bizarre ghost story, part whimsical farce, part idiosyncratic literary experiment, it could be described as P. G. Wodehouse collaborating with Raymond Roussel, with a dash of M. R. James, if it weren't so uniquely its own thing.

Iain Sinclair's 'Our Silenic Compact' is a psychogeographical exploration of London's geological substrata in search of the city's meteorites. Classic Sinclair, it touches and expands upon many of the themes of his most admired works. Brian Catling's 'Ahnighito' is a historical epic-in-miniature, a fictionalised account of the discovery and transportation of the enormous, 34-tonne anhnighito meteorite from Greenland to New York's Natural History Museum in 1894, where it still resides.