One Million Tiny Plays About Britain

Description

A Wonder Woman and bride-to-be finds herself worse for wear at the end of a hen night; a funeral director's love of Manchester United proves unhelpful when talking to the bereaved; two overly-vigilant mothers wrestle with their paranoia in the queue for Santa's Grotto; a widow recounts her disastrous return to the world of dating and a father realises that his son is growing away from him as he helps him tie his football boots. In these snippets of overheard conversations from across the length and breadth of the country, Craig Taylor captures the state we're in with humour and pathos and perfect timing. Laugh-out-loud funny, and sometimes heartbreakingly moving, these tiny plays in which every one of us could have a starring role are little windows into other people's lives that reveal the triumphs, disasters, prejudices, horrors and joys of twenty-first-century life. Hugely entertaining and utterly addictive, this is book that can be dipped into or feasted upon in one sitting. It will change the way you listen to the world around you, and train journeys will never be the same again.

Craig Taylor's non-fiction has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times and the Globe and Mail. His fiction has appeared in the Mississippi Review. He wrote One Million Tiny Plays About Britain for the Guardian's Weekend magazine for several years. Craig publishes Hamish Hamilton's Five Dials magazine as well as his own photocopied magazines, including The Review of Everything I've Ever Encountered and Dark Tales of Clapham. His first book, Return To Akenfield, was published by Granta in 2006, and the play of the novel toured the UK in 2009.

'Like the best playwrights, [Taylor's] characters have independent and spontaneous lives of their own contained within a carefully constructed dramatic architecture. Within his little worlds we see glimpses of the oddness, the quiet desperation, and the occasional tenderness of the lives of others. The plays are an original form: dramatic haikus' * Richard Eyre * 'Taylor's plays are acutely observed, exquisitely crafted tragicomedies, rooted in bitter or absurd truths. Through their tiny aperture they provide a detailed picture that sparks an all-important jolt of recognition which is, by turns, comical, satisfying and highly discomforting. They take all of one minute to read, but will make you think for a great deal longer' * Sunday Telegraph * 'One Million Tiny Plays About Britain reads like a digest of the nation's soaps, with a little bit of Alan Bennett and The Vicar of Dibley thrown in' * Times Literary Supplement *