Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Gross and Slimy Place
Bet They'll Miss Us When We're Gone
By Marianne Wiggins
Secker & Warburg 176pp £13.99 order from our bookshop
The world on which Marianne Wiggins’s stories opens is a strange one, and not only because in one of them an anglophone angel issues a death threat to a non-English-speaking Spanish bird-fancier over a defunct telephone. Wiggins seldom has recourse to such blatant disruption of the laws governing physical reality; she seldom needs to. As she describes it physical reality, and especially human reality, is lush, awesome and unnerving enough without angelic complication.
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