Bang Crunch, By Neil Smith

These are stories that misbehave. Wriggling little things that never do quite what you expect – and, however clever they appear to be, however weird but prescient the connections they seem to establish are, their greatest trick (they are so wilful it doesn't feel right to call them Neil Smith's) is to remain so full of feeling.

In "Isolettes" a self-consciously eccentric woman called An ("like the indefinite article") discovers there is actually a very real distance between her and other people. When she decides to have a baby to "anchor" herself in life she discovers what this remoteness means.

The title story features a girl who develops "Fred Hoyle syndrome", an unpleasant condition causing her to age at a terrifying rate before suddenly growing young again, expanding then shrinking like the universe, outgrowing her friends and family.

"The Butterfly Box" is narrated by a young man whose artist father spent his career trying to create "snapshots of the windless calm before an earthquake hits".

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