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Twenty-nine-year-old Lewis's family are the definition of dysfunctional: his brothers, living estranged and unknown lives in Texas and Toronto, his mother, confined in her self-imposed silent state in a room full of fish and amphibians and his father, at work in the Victory Barber Shop where customers are surrounded by souvenirs of wartime Europe. And Lewis, caught between working at a recruitment agency, helping his father out in the barbers and keeping his mother in touch with world news.

Abe Stone is a 61-year-old alcoholic with a Henry VIII fixation going through his third divorce. When he starts receiving letters from his dead mother, Evelyn, he is thrown into a late-stage identity crisis. His fourteen-year old grand-daughter, Lucille, is expelled from school and the unlikely couple embark on a quest to work out what Evelyn is trying to impart and how Abe can begin to put his dishevelled life in order.

Stories for the EasyJet generation': beautifully crafted, witty, perceptive, sometimes shocking and often heart-breaking stories that examine the impact of cheap international travel on modern lives and relationships. A lads' weekend in Eastern Europe spirals out of control. A bleeding tourist is rescued by a stranger in downtown Toronto. A middle-aged woman holidaying in Tunisia considers the local options for love. An unemployed man shares his fantasies of a sex tour of Arizona with his long-suffering girlfriend. A woman is drawn into an impromptu but life-changing football game in the heart of the Amazon. Following his universally acclaimed third novel, Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs, Somerset Maugham Award-winner, Rodge Glass, has created a themed, contemporary story collection like no other. With wit, wisdom, insight and pathos, he examines men and women of all ages who, through the advent of discount air travel, play out their lives and loves across the globe. Glass brilliantly captures the isolation, dislocation and occasional epiphanies of those who find themselves a thousand miles from home, and those who long to be.

Alasdair Gray, author of the modern classics Lanark, Poor Things and 1982, Janine, is without doubt Scotland's greatest living novelist. Since trying (unsuccessfully) to buy him a drink in 1998, Rodge Glass, first tutee and then secretary to the author, takes on the role of biographer, charting Gray's life from unpublished and unrecognised son of a box-maker to septuagenarian "little grey deity" (as Will Self has called him). A Jewish Mancunian Boswell to Gray's Johnson, Glass seamlessly weaves a chronological narrative of his subject's life into his own diary of meeting, getting to know and working with the artist, writer and campaigner, to create a vibrant and wonderfully textured portrait of a literary great.