Entertaining Strangers

Shortlisted for the 2013 East Midlands Book Award Entertaining Strangers is a tragi-comedy about the eccentric Edwin Prince - a depressive intellectual obsessed with high culture and ants - and the mysterious, homeless narrator Jules, who gradually unravels Edwin's impossible relationships with his landlady, neurotic mother, psychotic brother, domineering ex-wife, dead grandfather and, above all, his ant-farm. At the same time, Jules continually experiences traumatic memories full of fire and water, and gradually a terrible pre-history emerges from beneath all of the other stories, which seems somehow to shape both Jules's fiery dreams and Edwin's obsessions - a great fire, massacre and one girl's drowning in Smyrna, 75 years earlier.