Tales From the Coming War

Cover painting and illustrations by Joseph Dawson

One day, we will read the last book we will ever read; listen to the last record. We will run down the street, laughing, drenched to the bone by the last rainstorm. Far from the crumpled clothes in the hall, we will feel under the sheets for the last time that familiar heart-beat next to us.

These things are inevitable, and yet we continue to hope, and plan, and love.

This is how the characters in this collection face the last war the world will ever know. From the wild countryside of West Virginia, to a sterile museum in London, from a frozen battlefield in Ukraine to the high plains of Peru, and from islands scattered across the North Sea, the Aegean, and the Pacific, and many places in between, they resist, they imagine, and they remember—and they find that memory is an act of resistance, too.

Contains:

‘Notes on the Coming War’

• ‘I See Minza’
• ‘Desertscape’
• ‘Christ, Mammoth’
• ‘Death is like a Slotted Spoon’
• ‘In our Silences, They Speak’
• ‘Roses’
• ‘Chronicle’
• ‘The Zig-zag Line’
• ‘Letter to my Husband’
• ‘Bookshelf’
• ‘Moth’
• ‘Cruel & Unusual’
• ‘Dolls at Noon’

Publication 17th January 2025

Limited Edition: 300 copies