It is 1970 in the suburbs of north London and, from the untidy comfort of her crowded house, Colette Jones is watching her older brother go to pieces, drinking himself into oblivion on home-made wine. Colette knows the solace a drink can provide. But soon she finds she cannot afford to ignore the destructive effect alcohol is having on her family.

Gerard Woodward's considerations of trampolines, bird-tables and lightbulbs will leave the reader unable to regard those things in quite the same way again; they will also find science-fiction novels compressed to a few stanzas, strange potted biographies, and lists of edicts from long-dead tyrants.

Towards the end of the Second World War a young British artist called Kenneth Brill is arrested for painting landscapes near the old village of Heathrow. The authorities suspect his paintings contain coded information about the new military airfield that is to be built there. Brill protests that he is merely recording a landscape that will soon disappear. Under interrogation a more complicated picture emerges as Brill tells the story of his life - of growing up among the market gardens of The Heath, of his life on the London art scene of the 1930s, and his brief spell as a master at a minor...