This is a collection of disturbing short stories … Perhaps, as in Fernandez’s fiction, we are like the gravedigger in ‘May Day’ who stumbles upon ‘the boy with a glint of the sun lodged in his bloodshot eyes.’ In the mix of ‘hard data’ that we find in this book, we will be constantly nagged by the experience of a reality that artists, through their unblemished craft, have unwittingly kept from us – the non-aesthetic swirl of names and dates and words seeking to be swept into a coherence art never manages fully to get a grip on.”