These days lots of us know that Toby Litt writes his fictional works in alphabetical order, but when I bought Adventures in Capitalism in 1996 he was still only on the A and the revelation of that stylistic flourish was well in the future. What I did immediately know from reading it was that I was encountering a witty intelligence that wanted to fuck with my head. Plus I knew the geography of Ealing so well that I could picture precisely the real-life location of the spooked launderette, its neighbouring Indian restaurant AND funeral directors. This excellent tale of a wash with a ghostly difference, reread this 2020 morning, still makes me go OOOOH at the very end. 

First published in ‘Adventures in Capitalism’, 1996 and available online here