The much-anticipated fiction follow-up to Vertigo, this collection cements Joanna Walsh’s reputation. Wearing her learning lightly, Walsh’s stories make us see the world afresh while showing us she has read the world. In ‘Like a Fish Needs a …’ – perhaps the funniest, most freewheeling story ever written about cycling (and Freud and and and …) you read shenanigans worthy of Flann O’Brien. Meanwhile, in ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’, Walsh conjures up a country in which words themselves fall out of fashion – something that will never happen wherever Walsh is read.

‘Walsh toys with notions of realism versus fantasy and autobiography versus fiction. She exposes, and revels in, the absurdity of these boundaries, their indistinctness. Her clever, self-parodying stories capture the existential disarrangement of the writer, but also the existential disarrangement of anyone who finds real life strange and, at times, quite unreal.’ – The Guardian

‘Unsparingly observant and disconcertingly sharp . . . an eerily matter-of-fact chronicle of our own impending doom.’ – Kirkus Reviews

‘Terrifyingly perceptive, subversively hilarious – these stories are part Daniil Kharms, part-Lydia Davis – while also managing to be singularly Joanna Walsh; how her writing always manages to make everything else I read (and write) seem specious and frivolous.’ – Sara Baume

‘Worlds from the Word’s End puts narrative conventions and linguistic codes under great stress, and we finish the book feeling both have cracked here and there. We also feel, strangely, that Walsh’s private language has somehow become ours, as if we were suddenly fluent in a tongue we didn’t even know existed.’ – Hernán Díaz