As If
Ben Tufnell

Critically acclaimed weird fiction author Ben Tufnell 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 (The North Shore, Paradise) debuts a short story collection invoking 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. 

About the Author

Ben Tufnell is a writer and curator based in London. His short stories have been published by Conjunctions, Litro, Lunate, Nightjar Press, Storgy and Structo, amongst others, and included in Best British Short Stories 2024 (Salt Publishing).

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 and the Disquiet Fiction Prize, and 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.