Sail Away Land

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
There's a beautiful, insistent quality to these stories, a strange and lovely pull. They turn and beguile and turn again, until the reader is turned inside out. Through their strange shapes, Pester's stories reflect our own flat world with a clarity that wasn't apparent before. A singular talent with that rare gift of humour -- Dave Tynan
These vivid, luminous, outrageous stories are an invitation to consider, in the brightest light, all that we might prefer to leave in the shadows -- Rebecca Perry
Ben Pester is rightly celebrated for his combination of hard-won surrealism and the anxious poetry of 21st century working life. But it's a dream-logic that clarifies the thorniest corners of our hearts; and a perfectly pitched prose style that also evokes our maddest, most familiar thoughts and speech patterns. Sail Away Land is a triumph of near-peerless emotional accuracy. He's so much more fun than most writers and also twice as serious -- Luke Kennard
Tragic and comic and anxious and strange, Sail Away Land shows us the uneasy dreams of a society out of kilter. A resonant collection -- Thomas McMullan
To read Sail Away Land is to be transformed. These short stories are slant, squirming, fleshly. Absolutely modern and, yet, weirdly familiar. Pester is fascinated by entanglement - gothic, absurd, metaphysical. For example, there are people trapped inside other people. At the same time, these stories unveil that sudden but total change in atmosphere that leaves one feeling blasted open; the pressure drop that exists between our ordinary "outside" lives and those more irrational, faraway, unspeakable realms and textures of our existence. In doing, Pester gifts the reader with a way to think about those parts of ourselves that still commune with the mysterious hinterlands of our past, otherwise and child selves. I was riveted from beginning to end by the force and brilliance of this electric, anarchic collection -- Nell Osborne
We live in febrile times, the fabric of reality feels gossamer thin, and it has exhausted us. Then, Sail Away Land shimmers towards us out of our sleepy haze. The stories in this collection appear to take place in that uncanny space between the conscious and the unconscious, where everything is quotidian and yet deeply unfamiliar. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes warm and soft, often both at once, these stories twist and turn in their iterations; lavish dinner parties go on for days, doors open in the backs of heads or onto beautiful secret gardens, death is defied at parties. But for all their strangeness, Ben Pester's stories speak to a collective desire for human connection; for love and emotional truth. He is Marcel Amyé for the hypernormalisation era -- Claire Carroll
Sail Away Land cracks the form of short fiction open with Pester's signature deadpan humour and audacious playfulness. A collection about the mundanity of despair and the tedium of dystopia feels more relevant than ever for anyone living through our time -- Yan Ge