I'm excessively proud to announce the release of my next book: Stations, a conceptual collection of short fiction, forthcoming from David Philip Publishers in March 2016.

The blurb goes:

In his debut collection of award-winning stories, Nick Mulgrew tells fourteen subtly interlinked tales set along the Southern African coastline from Cape Town to Mozambique, in which relationships, dreams and even narrators die; where fields catch fire, towers implode, and the shadows of the past grow long. But even from the most uneasy corners – tourist traps, colonial purgatories and libraries for the blind – these stories offer small mercies: glimpses of faith, beauty and the possibility of salvation, no matter how slight.

Told with a magpie’s eye for the vivid in the ordinary, and the surreal in the everyday, Stations presents a fresh, compelling and essential new voice.

With a cover designed by Louis de Villiers and illustration by skullboy (two sides of the same man, really), Stations is the culmination of seven years of short fiction writing, and, for me, the real beginning of my career.

(The full cover is so jarring, too, that my own mother told me I should "say a hundred Our Fathers".)

Being able to work with a historied, independent house like David Philip means that I've been able to bring out my vision of what collections of short fiction should be: coherent, thematically consistent, exciting in both form and format, and pleasurable to read. No other publishing house would ever give me such creative freedom – whether that turns out to be a blessing or not will be found out soon.

Stations includes a number of award-winning and almost-award-winning stories, including "Turning", the winner of the 2014 National Arts Festival short story award, and "Posman" a 2015 shortlistee for the White Review Prize in the U.K. & Ireland. The collection also features a handful of brand-new stories.

But, frankly, buy it only for my description of Cecil John Rhodes being stoned to near-death in Purgatory.