Two Tall Tales and One Short Novel, is a collection of stories by three of the UK's brightest new writing talents: The Mesmerist's Daughter by Heidi James, Smokin' the Queen by Kay Sexton, and In the Clear by Lucy Fry. Together the stories transport the reader into the minds of three very different characters. The Mesmerist's Daughter, a fairytale minus the fairies, tells the story of an imaginative young girl, Nicola, who thinks her mother is a wolf. Stifled by her home environment and her mother's lies, Nicola's quest is literally to rediscover her own voice. In Smokin' the Queen, Darius, a damaged, black DJ, travels from his home in Brixton to the West of England. There he finds work and shelter, and manages to forget his troubles in the bewitching company of a local woman. As summer turns to autumn, however, his anxieties resurface, impelling him to take desperate action. Told with humour and verve, In the Clear explores an obsessional relationship whose breakdown sends its narrator into a spiral of depression. Her only chance of salvation is to reach out to the world, but to do so she must first escape the confines of her own self-consciousness. "Two Tall Tales and One Short Novel is inventive in language and exuberant in narrative. You'll be hard pressed to find such fantastic fictions in more mainstream, well-behaved publications." Russell Celyn Jones