Dragan Todorovic

Two unaccompanied children travel across the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat that has been designed to only make it halfway across... A 63-year-old man is woken one morning by border officers 'acting on a tip-off' and, despite having paid taxes for 28 years, is suddenly cast into the detention system with no obvious means of escape... An orphan whose entire life has been spent in slavery - first on a Ghanaian farm, then as a victim of trafficking - writes to the Home Office for help, only to be rewarded with a jail sentence and indefinite detention... These are not fictions. Nor are they testimonies from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly common experiences of Europe's new underclass - its refugees. While those with "citizenship" enjoy basic human rights (like the right not to be detained without charge for more than 14 days), people seeking asylum can be suspended for years in Kafka-esque uncertainty. Here, poets and novelists retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of Britain's policy of indefinite immigration detention. Presenting their accounts anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims' stories in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.

Dragan Todorovic's Little Red Transistor Radio from Trieste is the first collection of his uniquely dark, surreal and searing short stories. From a young boy discovering rock 'n' roll rebellion via his transistor radio in a small town in the former Yugoslavia, to a speculative supermarket where even the fake fruit and air fresheners can't hide pervasive shades of death, these stories encounter other 'possible selves', passengers, angels and voyeurs; things are lost and found and nowhere or no-one is quite as they appear to be. Combining blistering observations with an unnerving and precise articulation of our worst-kept secrets and fears, these stories come to vivid and spellbinding life at Dragan Todorovic's command; in compelling dreams and nightmares they redraw the boundaries between the real and the imagined. "Dragan Todorovic is a master storyteller, ushering us into familiar worlds and then disturbing the peace, charming us with his wit only to outwit us with his magic. His fictions are sharp, elegant, and shapely and deeply, deliciously consoling." Maureen Freely"These strange and beautiful stories ask us the very deepest questions about ourselves. I loved them." Scarlett ThomasDragan Todorovic is a writer and multimedia artist whose publications include eight books of nonfiction, poetry and fiction. He has worked extensively in print and electronic media, both in Serbia (where he was born) and in Canada (where he lived between 1995 and 2005). Some of his articles, books and artistic projects have won international awards. Little Red Transistor Radio from Trieste is his first collection of short stories to be published in the UK.