A Nosegay of Pleasant Delights: Five-minute fictions
By Brian S. Lee
First edition, 2016. Illustrations by Laura Anne Passarello. Portlaoise: Evertype. ISBN 978-1-78201-146-0 (paperback), price: €12.95, £10.95, $15.95.Click on the book cover on the right to order this book from Amazon.co.uk!
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“Ask Father Christmas for a lovely dolly, Belinda,” the next mother said, urging her little daughter forward. “I don’t want a doll. I hate dolls!” “But why?” asked her distressed mother. “They’re girlie things.” “But you’re a—” “What would you like, Belinda?” Nick asked. The child marched up to him and placing her tiny fists belligerently on his knees demanded, “Why do you have a brown beard under your white one?” “Well, that one is growing, and this one isn’t.” “Is it a fake, then,” she asked pointedly, “a real fake?” |
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A Nosegay odorous and not onerous: thirty delightfully brief and varied stories, urban, domestic, rural, or extra-terrestrial, in style quirky or jocoserious, set in places as disparate as England, Europe, Africa, and America, in eras ranging from ancient and medieval to modern and futuristic, encompassing science fiction, romance, fantasy, and history, all drawn from a well as deep and treacly as the Dormouse’s in Wonderland. Brian S. Lee is a teacher and academic, long resident in a leafy suburb of Cape Town, near the fynbos-covered slopes of Table Mountain, between the cold Atlantic and warm Indian Oceans. |
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