Don't Try This at Home by Angela Readman

What if one summer your mum was Elvis? What if you met yourself in the future and you were homeless? What if you were born with the face of a dog, or became a witch's apprentice?

Angela Readman's collection of short stories Don't Try This At Home is surreal, fantastical and carefully everyday. Readman, also a published poet, builds these small worlds with care and efficiency. Short, rhythmic sentences create tangible and down to earth settings for remarkable developments. In many of these tales, the narrator will be a child trying to get to grips with the adult world. For these children, the prospect of adulthood can be simultaneously dizzying with possibilities and frustrating with limitations. Your mum can fall in love with another woman and transform overnight into the hip-swivelling, velvet-voiced legend of the chip shop, and then be brought crashing to earth by the small-mindedness around her.

Transformation unites these stories. Although they're most often set in everyday situations, magic seems to infuse these worlds. Yet the reader may never be totally clear on whether these are genuine miracles or acts of the mind. Often we seem to be witnesses to terrified people using their imagination to protect themselves from the unspeakably banal horrors of their reality. Either way, this is an enchantingly absurd marriage of the ordinary and extraordinary.