Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink.
Consider: around you the world is swirling - you pass through a submerged town, the bakery, a wheelbarrow, a bike floating on its side on the main street, its steeples and trees barely visible through the thick water.
Consider: in the distance the wreck of the gunship Elizabeth lolls on a sandback a couple of miles from the shore. Oil slicks the canals of the capital and even now in the midst of the bombing, the old men still like to tell tales of mermen in the shallows.
Consider: a pool, empty of water save for a brackish puddle at one end that has escaped the summer heat. A huddle of fine bones and hanks of fur - the remains of mice or possums that have tumbled in, lured perhaps by the water. And two boys stand by its edge, watching a bracelet flash through the humid air into the deep end.
In bestselling author Chris Womersley's first short fiction collection, twenty macabre and deliciously enjoyable tales linked by the trickle of water that runs through them all will keep readers spellbound until their final, unexpected and unsettling twist...
