This book is, as far as I am aware, a publishing first - being the first full length book containing a collection of very short fiction from a large(ish) publisher. Every story is between one and two pages long; firmly in flash fiction territory. Although the alternative term, postcard fiction, feels better suited to this collection. Each story reading as the kind of thoughts that might get jotted down on a postcard or notepaper. After the sudden recollection of a past event, to record something that had just happened, or an immediate reaction to what had been read or heard in the news. Lennon, whose best known previous work is the novel, Mailman, tells in the introduction how most came to him while he was out walking his local neighbourhood. Some are based on truths, some made up, most you suspect meet somewhere in the middle.

One tells how the authors impression of an unknown family is subtly but completely transformed when he realises that, what he assumed a statue of the Virgin Mary in their garden, is merely a picnic-table umbrella folded up for winter. Another relates a story the narrator and his wife had been telling friends for many years past; of how they met. Of how, falling asleep in his car, the narrator veered many miles over open desert, to end up on the wrong road and the wrong motel. Years later, looking at the map the couple are reluctant to admit the sheer impossibility of their story. They realise neither of them can quite remember how the story started. Did they really make it up?

Each possesses a stripped down, minimalist feel. There is little embellishment and read on their own they risk washing over the reader without leaving a lasting impression. Taken together though, the stories become eerily affecting. One by one they build a creeping sense of suburban menace. Where people act at cross purposes and unlikely and almost uncanny connections are made in peoples’ lives. Where nothing is quite as clear cut as it may first seem. My personal favourite tells the tale of an author who writes a history of the local town. The first draft is too long for her publishers. Nonetheless encouraged by their interest she edits it. But finds once she starts she is quickly addicted to the process of reduction. The book's length is halved, cut to novella length and then short story length. Finally it is reduced to a haiku that she hands out on cards, from the park bench that she has taken to sleeping on. The narrator comments that he has a copy pinned above his desk, "I read it frequently, sometimes with pity but always with awe."

I know this book is something I will turn to again and again in the future; every time I've a spare five minutes and happen to be near my bookshelf looking for a quick (or not so quick as often happens) literary fix.