As If - by Ben Tufnell (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Critically acclaimed weird fiction author Ben Tufnell (The North Shore, Paradise) returns with a powerful debut collection of short fiction.

At the end of a long summer, young boys find a skull on the beach. An artist destroys her work in order to create anew. An antique mirror offers a glimpse of another reality. An urban street is suddenly and inexplicably depopulated allowing nature to reestablish itself.

Ben Tufnell's debut short story collection invokes marginal spaces and states of mind--the precarious thresholds between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience--and landscapes including the Norfolk coast, the Welsh Marches, the jungles of Argentina and the mountains of the Pyrenees. These fourteen stories build cumulatively to create a vision of a world in which everything is interconnected yet nothing is certain, boundaries and borders are indistinct, and reality is porous.

Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR PARADISE by Ben Tufnell

"Paradise is a compelling fusion of literary noir with eco-fable--page turning and profound, I loved this book. Tufnell is a tour de force of imaginative power."
--James Miller, author of Lost Boys

"Paradise begins as an engrossing neo-noir before pivoting into something considerably stranger, in a manner that recalls a peculiar array of other works: Ben Wheatley's Kill List, Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, Michael Ende's children's novel Momo. A Kafkaesque end-times parable of acceleration and collapse, violence and repair, it is a resonant page-turner fit for the Capitalocene."
--Seán Padraic Birnie, author of I Would Haunt You If I Could

"A powerful novel of psychogeography set between two landscapes, urban and rural, in a world palpably on the brink of collapse. Febrile with paranoia and alienation, Paradise confronts the crucial, intimate matter of our time: how 'to be' at the end of all things."
--Charlotte Tierney, author of The Cat Bride

"A Kafakaesque maelstrom of a novel, with folk horror lurking at the edges. Tufnell remains a wonderfully strange writer."
--Amy Twigg, author of Spoilt Creatures

"An unsettling novel of juxtapositions and surprises, Paradise moves between city and forest, bringing both to teeming, violent life. Tufnell creates landscapes that work upon us on the deepest level."
--Aliya Whiteley, author of Three Eight One

About the Author

Ben Tufnell is a writer and curator based in London. He has written fiction for many years with publications in Conjunctions, Litro, Lunate, Nightjar Press, Storgy and Structo, amongst others, and was included in Best British Short Stories 2024. He has been longlisted or highly commended for the BBC National Short Story Award, the Sean O'Faolain Short Story Prize, The White Review Short Story Prize, the Disquiet Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the Society of Authors' ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award for short fiction. His debut novel, The North Shore, was published by Fleet (Little, Brown) in 2023.

Previously a curator at Tate, Tufnell is a founding director of Parafin, an independent gallery. He has published widely on modern and contemporary art, in particular on artforms that engage with ideas of landscape and nature.