Christopher Priest, he dead. He died in February 2024. He will now know time from a different angle. I look forward to reading those stories! It’s perhaps no surprise that another Christopher, Nolan, for whom time is just as much an obsession adapted one of Priest’s novels, The Prestige, into a film.

The title story in the collection, the first, best illustrates Priest’s understanding of time, when one of a pair of young Victorian lovers is caught, and suspended, in an eternal moment in summer and her lover, still caught in time’s flow, returns to the place and the moment hoping to see her.

Perception, being cousin to time, is another Priest concern, as depicted in the final novella, ‘The Watched’, set on an island where everything is watched. Does time flow when no one is watching it?

These are strange, spare, fascinating stories that hint at much without necessarily having more to say than the words on the paper. The time and the perception of the reader, his or her interaction with the words, are what make these stories, or unmake them: for you, they may be as dull and lifeless as yesterday’s newspapers or as vivid and unsettling as being part of today’s news.