'In these stories mermaid meets mobile phone and is fascinated by its beeps and lights, a woman finds out what it means to be loved by a lawnmower, there's a lesbian seagull, a real life Assumption, a fairytale on the London Underground... and incidentally, Virgina Woolf and John Donne are convincingly unmasked as vampires. These are stories by a writer who loves language and loves books, a writer who's more than at home with a literary tradition - someone, in fact, who's beyond tradition, who can take it into the new and the now.' From the foreword by Ali Smith.