The separate heart

"If there is a thread running through Simon Robson's brilliant collection of stories it is the notion of separateness - of adults from each other, of children from adult knowledge, of adult consciousness from the vividness of childhood. His protagonists are often unlikely - a cat, a man, met in a bar, who drove a chariot in Ben Hur, a girl who gets up very early - but these stories are satisfyingly long and devoid of modernist trickery; rather they are wise, funny, beautifully observed and somehow utterly true."