Triple Word Score

While visiting her doctor one day, a bored housewife is asked if she would like to sell a proportion of her time—a fraction of her every waking hour—to anonymous investors. The discovery of mysterious reels of film in a Hollywood basement allows viewers to watch classic films, starring decrepit, 100-year-old versions of their once-young stars. An avid player of the Sims computer game realizes too late that her boyfriend’s family isn’t quite as it appears. In this collection of short stories, award-winning author Frank Cottrell Boyce, in his first work of adult fiction, performs feat after feat of high-wire, narrative acrobats, with works that move effortlessly between surrealism, metaphysical drama, science fiction, and contemporary pop culture. Drawing on influences as disparate as Stanislaw Lem, Nikolai Gogol, and Roald Dahl, Boyce lures readers into a hall of mirrors, where each character is an illusion and every plot line is turned inside-out.