Caravan Thieves

Description

A beguiling, disconcerting and marvellously readable collection of short stories by the Booker-shortlisted author of August and I'll Go to Bed at Noon. The quotidian and the surreal inhabit the same vivid and perplexing world in this collection of stories. Full of his trademark mixture of humour, pathos, disappointed families and dysfunctional lives, they include an ostracised small-town puppeteer, a commuter who fails to recognise his ex-wife, a bereaved academic working in the college kitchens after his part in a sex scandal and a family who wake up to find their caravan has been mysteriously transported overnight...

Gerard is the author of an acclaimed sequence of novels, August (shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread First Novel Award), I'll Go to Bed at Noon (shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize) and A Curious Earth. He was born in London in 1961, and published several prize-winning collections of poetry before turning to fiction. His latest collection of poetry, We Were Pedestrians was shortlisted for the 2005 T.S.Eliot Prize. He is Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and lives in Bath with his family.

He writes with subtlety and skill... beautifully manipulating the language which veers and soars from the vernacular to the high-flown and summoning characters that are at once believable and sympathetic * Daily Telegraph * Extremely readable and enjoyable * Guardian * Brilliantly unsettling * Observer * In clean, uncomplicated prose inlaid with images of striking lyricism, Woodward explores the bizarre possibilities of ordinary people's lives * Sunday Telegraph * The down-to-earth dialogue and the deadpan delivery remain doggedly realistic, and some stories retain not only the ring of truth but also its open-ended structure * Times Literary Supplement *