Bruce Glasscock is frustrated and tired. He lives platonically with his wife Linda as caretakers of an English Trust house, preserved since the 1930s—much like the Glasscocks' sex life. Bruce isn't trusted to do much and the pills he's on from his army days mean he is banned from doing things he'd like, so he passes his days cleaning toilets and being treated like a child by Linda. His main entertainment comes from encouraging his dog Bruno to piss on the head of the garden gnome and sneaking to the RegNancy pub for some falling-down water. When a keen new volunteer called Richard arrives, he's everything Linda adores and Bruce hates—cocky, helpful, charming, interested and knowledgeable. And the harder Bruce tries to get it right and come out as top dog, the worse it seems to be getting.

Three novellas stamped with a surreal, sometimes hilarious, often moving humanity. In Monkey's Birthday we get to know the inhabitants of a street through their houses and the bizarre objects, memories and longings which furnish them. In English Electric Crump grips us with the tension of not quite knowing how the main character is linked to the death of a young girl. Early Doors is pure CARRY ON where people really are disgusting and duplicitous; where people suffer the outrageous accidents that befall them; where people die and we feel bereft. When the hatchet falls, as it inevitably does, the strength of Crump's writing is confirmed by how deeply we care.