Sail Away Land

Ben Pester author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Granta Books

Publishing:4th Jun '26

£14.99

This title is due to be published on 4th June, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Sail Away Land cover

A collection of dizzying stories that feel both undeniably real and disarmingly uncanny, from the acclaimed author of The Expansion Project.

Sail Away Land is the space where we might go when we're no longer alive (sometimes only temporarily). In this uncommon and disarming collection, the characters go 'there' with or without knowing it. Maybe they have been living there all along without noticing - just like they hadn't really noticed that everyone is carrying a shiny black suitcase. These stories are about normal things - losing the people we're closest to, forgiving them, finding love and managing to hold onto it - but also about going to parties through a door in the back of a colleague's head, housebreaking in search of a sister's ghost, and asking the strangers in the kitchen to resurrect you at midnight. Like brilliant and strange anxiety dreams in prose, the stories in Sail Away Land are full of temporal weirdness, life and non-being, psychological acuity, imagination and wit, all while being effortlessly, seductively readable and incredibly moving.

I hugely enjoyed Sail Away Land. Bizarre and disquieting... Very few, if any contemporary writers, capture the drudgery of life in capitalist society, the scourge of deferred gratification, in quite the way that Ben Pester does, the feeling of being constantly trapped inside an anxiety dream -- Sara Baume
Moving deftly between corporate weirdness, the anxiety of rejection, and the warm haze of childhood memory, Sail Away Land is just how I like my short story collections: playful and particular. I feel lucky to have read it -- Saba Sams
'Pester is a genius of capturing the vicissitudes of contemporary life' -- Luke Kennard
'Pester inhabits familiar spaces only to skewer them with a signature style and humour' -- Irenosen Okojie
'Ben Pester is my favourite cartographer for that zone in the soul where panic shades into true metaphysical horror' -- Tim MacGabhann
'Ben Pester's vertiginous and stunningly weird stories are acts of inversion' -- Chris Power

ISBN: 9781803514291

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

208 pages