Toward the end of this fine retrospective collection of Tony Birch’s short fiction, there is a story called ‘The Bicycle Thieves’. The nod to Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 film signals that these stories sit within the universe of realist fiction. Not just realism in the sense that they do something very different from romance, comedy, or fantasy, but in the sense that they reflect a specific commitment to proletarian life known as social realism. Something that you will not find anywhere in these twenty-two stories is the entirety of bourgeois existence. Almost as if the zombie apocalypse has taken place, Birch’s world is devoid of universities, office buildings, the internet, mobile phones, air travel, café lattes, Pilates studios, photocopiers, or noise-cancelling headphones.