Like a PrisonerThe book contains eleven dramatic and often horrifying stories, each describing the life of a different prisoner in the camps and prisons of communist Albania. The prisoners adapt, endure, and generally survive, all in different ways. They may conform, rebel, construct alternative realities of the imagination, cultivate hope, cling to memories of lost love, or devisenincreasingly strange and surreal strategies of resistance. The characters

Ní Ghríofa engages in a strikingly physical way with the world of her subject

In her kaleidoscopic novel

she finds herself thrust into a series of adventures with a mercurial rogue called Chivalry

and crackling with energy

Many of the entries are not

Simultaneously nostalgic and highly concerned with the future

His erudite research and selection of sources

There’s a lot of love lurking in this collection

despair heard above the hysterical gossip of the insatiable gulls

Martin Hayes’ third Smokestack collection is a hymn to the invisible workers everywhere who hold up the sky – specifically the couriers and support staff who have been working 15-hours a day to distribute PPE and test kits up and down the UK

a troubled Canadian man

Even the Dogs