The internet has collapsed the boundaries of time, space, and desire. However far apart lovers are, they can instantly be present. So can they ever really break up?This is the question Walsh's narrator must reckon with as she travels across Europe after the end of a love affair conducted largely online. This pilgrimage through 'offline' space dictated by chance - on railways, on buses, on planes and, above all, on foot - wrestles with the dangers of converting longing into language, and reclaims and reshapes the territory of the male travel writer by creating personal and innovative maps of cities by which Walsh navigates the complexities of modern love.This is a work about borders - between places, people, genres - and how we might cross them. Challenging the divisions between intellect and intimacy, Walsh blends the personal and the critical to tell a mystery story about her own reality. But Break.up also challenges the borders between fiction and non-fiction, ranging...

Wry, alien, intimate linked stories about family, motherhood, divorce, and isolation.

This collection cements Joanna Walsh's reputation as one of the sharpest writers of this century. Wearing her learning lightly, Walsh's stories make us see the world afresh while showing us she has read the world. In 'Like a Fish Needs a . . .' – perhaps the funniest, most freewheeling story ever written about cycling (and Freud and and and . . .) you read shenanigans worthy of Flann O'Brien. Meanwhile, in 'Worlds from the Word's End', Walsh conjures up a country in which words themselves fall out of fashion – something that will never happen wherever Walsh is read.