Mouths to Speak, Voices to Sing and Other Stories

Exploring our everyday human experiences against the backdrop of the wondrous and fantastic A rich man’s obsession with ancient Chinese jars leads him to a secret afterlife. A talking cricket reveals to a family the depths of their tragedy. A young girl manoeuvres her way through an inundated world, but unlike her elders, does so with hope and without the burden of the past. A country teeters at the edge of doomsday under a cloud of sparrows. Monsters disguised as men indulge in their desires with impossible creatures. From the everyday to the extraordinary, from the mundane to the magical, from domestic artificial intelligence to explosive spirits and horrific supernatural dimensions, here are stories that deal with human nature filtered through the lens of the strange and speculative.Exploring our everyday human experiences against the backdrop of the wondrous and fantastic Singing Chinese antiquities. Ghosts that only one young man could sense. A house with a sentient A.I. that becomes a part of the family. A cricket that acts as a tragic voice of reason. A man born and bred for neural mass surveillance. This anthology is a collection of unpredictable stories of various genres—fantasy, science fiction, crime, horror and the supernatural—that touch on courage and fear, loss and resolution, denial and honesty, despair and hope…from an author who writes about being human in a world where the unseen is suddenly exposed. Every story is written in versatile language, with characters sure to elicit sympathy, and perhaps even familiarity, from readers who are sure to recognize themselves or those they know in the unique situations of each entertaining tale.