David Szalay's debut novel is set in the alcohol-sodden, materialistic, insecure and increasingly sham world of a telephone salesman. The salesman in question is Paul Rainey, a 40-year-old functioning alcoholic on anti-anxiety medication who commutes into London every day from Hove.

It was spring 1948 and Aleksandr was a major in the MGB - a forerunner of the KGB. He had an assignment: to visit Metelyev Log, a rural psychiatric clinic run by Professor Lozovsky and his wife, Nadezhda. 25 years later, in the dawn of detente, he interrogates his memories of the case and tries to trace its effects."

James and Katherine meet at a wedding in London. It is January 2006, towards the end of the money-for-nothing years, and James is a man with a varied past - entrepreneur, estate agent, film producer - now living alone in a flat in Bloomsbury. Separated from her husband, a successful paparazzo, Katherine is working at an interim job in a hotel.

Nine men. Each of them at a different stage of life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving - in the suburbs of Prague, beside a Belgian motorway, in a cheap Cypriot hotel - to understand just what it means to be alive, here and now.

**WINNER OF THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE 2019**Discover the brilliant new short story collection from the Man Booker-shortlisted author of All That Man IsTwelve people on the move around planet Earth, twelve individual lives, each in turmoil, and each in some way touching the next.