I also really enjoyed The Great Awake which looks at a city when suddenly almost everyone becomes an insomniac. On the week of her 15th birthday she starts to loose her teeth and at a party, things take a sinister turn. Her mother puts it down to a difficult puberty, her grandmother apparently went through the same thing. Mantis is about a teenage girl with problem skin, she sheds it constantly. I’m struggling a little with how to review a collection of short stories so I think I will just tell you a little about the ones I enjoyed the most! These stories are quite short and there are 9 stories in all.

Blurring the mythic and the gothic with the everyday, salt slow considers characters in motion – turning away, turning back or simply turning into something new entirely.

The mundane worlds of schools and sleepy sea-side towns are invaded and transformed, creating a landscape which is constantly shifting to hold on to its inhabitants. Teenagers develop ungodly appetites, a city becomes insomniac overnight, and bodies are diligently picked apart to make up better ones. In her brilliantly inventive and haunting debut collection of stories, Julia Armfield explores bodies and the bodily, mapping the skin and bones of her characters through their experiences of isolation, obsession, love and revenge. The cover is just beautiful (which I have to admit influenced my decision) and I rarely read short stories so I thought this would make a change! Salt Slow by Julia Armfield is the first one I chose to read. I do think it must be quite tricky to judge fiction (including poetry and short stories) against non fiction and I don’t envy the judges their job!

I wanted to try and read at least 2 of the books before the ceremony.