Introduction

These stories each use ideas of place differently, whether to signal class or status, insecurity or transience, human connection or violence, satire or sincerity. Some feature what were once called ‘non-places’ – airport lounges, barns, motorways, tube stations, malls. Even the settings with the most potency – cathedrals, cottages, abbeys, housing estates – are rendered to suggest something unexpected in their familiar forms. I’ve ordered this list according to solidity – why not? – beginning with the most grounded and ending with the most allusive. By the end the whole concept of place will have dissolved utterly, taking with it the very foundations of this list. I can’t apologise enough.