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“Mark Stewart’s stories are mesmeric and invigoratingly iconoclastic. He is splendid company as he steers us through the edgelands – the liminal places. For him the boundaries that carve up our world are porous and negotiable, and to travel with him is to question the utility of our usual categories. He gives us new eyes: that is a great gift.”
Charles Foster
Author of Being a Beast
The orchard keeper knew the secret. When the wind moved, the Fire Trees, their painted cores rich with iridescent sap, released their stories onto the air, like oils bleeding onto a canvass. All you had to do was look deep into the woods and wait for the hidden stories to appear:
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A jewelled frog whose skin is a living canvass
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The death of the last bumble bee pushes humanity into the shadow of extinction
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A Viking funeral that takes place in a suburban garden
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A love letter cast upon cosmic tides by an astronaut trapped in orbit
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Two Martian settlers, a mother and her baby, struggling to survive on the surface of an inhospitable and deadly world
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An archive of living trees whose trunks still contain an echo of the Battle of Britain
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A hedgehog who can remember a time when pendragons still ruled England
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A dormouse dreaming of interstellar travel as she sleeps her way through winter
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A song of lament sung by the Moon as it witnesses the death of its companion world
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A condemned man standing on the gallows, haunted by lost opportunities, as the trapdoor opens beneath his feet
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A world in which the poor are dying of starvation and radiation poisoning, while the rich pick the planet clean
Extracts from the Collection:
Thriving in the Edgelands - Why the Short Story is Alive and Well