The stories in A Year of Two Summers introduce us to an array of characters as they negotiate identity, migration, belonging, and the things that get lost in translation. A new recruit fantasises about a fellow soldier during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon; a young gay man experiments with cross-dressing; a father worries about protecting his son during the bombing of Tel Aviv; a South African woman and her Syrian boyfriend tiptoe around each other as they look after their unexpected baby. These stories keep alive the elements of both Jewish and gay traditions of storytelling. The are lyrical and unflinching, nostalgic and pragmatic.

A Year of Two Summers won an Arts Council of England Writers Award when it was still a work in progress.

£7.99, Five Leave Publications, 2005

order a copy here.

Set alongside “Bathers 1917-18” by the artist Mark Gertler, the story “Trees at a Sanatorium” was written specifically for this publication. It is a meditation on landscape and the importance of intimacy in artistic creation. The story was written while visiting places where Gertler stayed, from the sanatorium at Banchory in Scotland, to Catalonia, Paris and the gardens at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire.

This is the first of The Nobile Folios series – monographic explorations of 20th- and 21st-century works of art – published by Sylph Editions. Another story based on Mark Gertler’s life won the Moment Short Fiction Prize.

Order a copy here through Sylph Editions.