A man builds a tree house by a river, in anticipation of the coming flood. A young woman is almost killed when a sugar-beet crashes through her windscreen. A boy sets fire to a barn. A father is arrested when he tries to watch his daughter' s school nativity play. A pair of itinerant labourers sit by a lake, talking about shovels and sex, while fighter planes fly low overhead and prepare for war.
These aren't the sort of things you imagine happening to someone like you. But sometimes they do.
Set in the flat and threatened fenland landscape, where the sky is dominant and the sea lurks just beyond the horizon, these delicate, dangerous, and sometimes deeply funny stories tell of things buried and unearthed, of familiar places made strange, and of lives where much is hidden, much is at risk, and tender moments are hard-won.
In language inflected with the lanescape's own understatement, narrators tell us what they believe to be important, while the real stories lie in what they unwittingly let slip and the gaps in which they pause for breath.
