Triple Word Score — Frank Cottrell Boyce

Visiting her GP one day, a bored house wife is asked if she would like to ‘sell' a proportion of her time â€" a fraction of her every, waking hour â€" to anonymous investors…

The discovery of mysterious reels of celluloid 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 realises too late that her boyfriend's family isn't quite as it appears…
 

Frank Cottrell Boyce's debut collection performs feat after feat of high-wire, narrative acrobats, like a gravity-defying trapeze artist moving 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 us into a hall of mirrors, where each character is an illusion, every plot line turned inside-out.
 

Mario Balotelli meets King Arthur's knights; the Cottingley Fairies get a genetically engineered makeover; shoppers at a branch of Tesco's barricade themselves in when they realize that the entire world's currency has just lost all its meaning…