The Book Of Manchester: A City In Short Fiction
Edited by David Sue, Comma Press, £10.99 
 

“A few stops before town she came down with her nose in her handbag, after a cig. She got off and stayed at the stop awhile, cupping her hands to light up. When she crossed he leapt off at the last second and followed her to Hulme, keeping her well ahead. Between them were bikes, prams, old biddies hunched in saris bobbing into the greengrocers, skinny Jamaicans leaning outside a café... A line of big lads gave him f***off stares and he walked in the road to get by.” 

Tom Benn’s description of an obsessive son following his mother into her secret life pulls focus on a city teeming with stories.

It is one of a dozen pieces on the great northern metropolis brought together in this compendium from Comma Press. With its back-story of gothic ambition, industrialised slavery to dark Satanic mills, protest movements and insurgent music scene, Manchester arrives ready-branded for the imagination. Updating the story, twelve writers conjure contemporary life against a backdrop of poverty, crime and excess.