The Bureau of Lost Things

If you are a fan of the short story genre then this is for you. If you enjoy writing that combines the thoughtful with humour, that mixes fact with fiction whilst at the same time blurring the lines between the real and the unreal then this is definitely for you. If you appreciate the quirkiness of the human condition, the strangeness of everyday life and can empathise with the weirdness of life in general, then read on. The collection was written whilst the author was living and working in Moscow and is based around his experiences, characters, and everyday life in modern day Russia. The stories will take you to places you have never been before nor - in some instances - places you would never have imagined. They are not, strictly speaking, fiction but rather fiction built around fairly solid frameworks of fact. The stories carefully weave the fictional narrative into real world places and makes them strikingly vivid whether in the surreal and Gothic nature of 'Sergei and the Lido' or the seemingly much more real-world rooted Tigran Farakin. There are twelve stories in all, loosely linked, and between them they create an absorbing world peopled with unusual characters whose behaviours and traits will nonetheless ring true and even, in some instances, be recognisable from our own experiences, despite the world here being quite different to that of the book's most likely readers. There is much humour in the stories and a thread of irreverence for the staid and static that runs through the whole collection, whether the events described are fantastic or apparently mundane.