Telling Stories
by Geoff Palmer
WINNER OF THE REED / NORTH & SOUTH FICTION AWARDI weave fictions round my life. Alternate realities where I am the master of every situation ... I know my alter-ego better than I know myself, or anyone else for that matter, and yet he is a mirage, not-even-ghost, the fiction of a fiction.Steven Spalding is a mild-mannered, overweight civil servant with a humdrum, solitary life. But he has a secret: a rude, wise-cracking, anarchic alter-ego named Eric Dombey.Buried in hilarious tales of comic genius, in a variety of formats ranging from diary entries to movie scripts, a truer picture of the real Steven begins to emerge, and all is not as it seems. As events in his life accelerate and slip out of control, the boundaries between the real and the unreal begin to blur.In this cleverly crafted novel, Geoff Palmer makes us reconsider the whole concept of fiction and reality, while providing keen yet sympathetic insights into the...