The Meat Eaters, Michael Collins

(This collection of nine stories heralds the arrival of a new name in Irish fiction. In the title story, a young man travels to America, posing as a Nationalist hero and carrying a suitcase full of meat. In the blackly humorous world that these stories inhabit, fact and imagination are often fused. But Collins richly surreal style is tempered by images of real people the widow struggling for survival, the abandoned child, the petty philosopher which is what makes this such a bewilderingly good first collection. Reading Collins stories... is like being mugged in a savage land THE TIMES Collins should be congratulated for having produced an exceptionally strong first work SUNDAY TELEGRAPH. From Ireland comes Michael Collins The Meat Eaters, a collection of colourful, surreal and vividly characterised stories already prompting comparisons to Joyce and Beckett THE LIST)