In Another Country

The stories of David Constantine are unlike any others. His characters possess you instantly, making you see the world as they do sometimes as exiles, driven into isolation by convictions that even they don't fully understand; sometimes as carriers of an unspoken but unbearable weight. The things they pursue, or evade, are often unseen and at a distance like the perfectly preserved body of a woman in the title story, waiting to be discovered in the receding ice of a Swiss glacier. These tokens of the past, or future, haunt Constantine's characters, but the landscapes that produce them also offer salvation, places of refuge or small treasures to take solace in like the piece of driftwood a beachcomber chooses to carve into his idea of perfection. Gathering together stories from over two decades of writing, this selection demonstrates why Constantine has been hailed as perhaps the finest of contemporary writers in this form. Their bewitching and urgent language is at one and the same time unsettling and strong enough to help.