All the essays in the collection focus on storytelling. Warm, funny and entertaining, they discuss Philip's own stories, the craft of writing, other storytellers and the importance of stories in our culture.

    Children can kill a monster and feel quite proud of themselves. A girl can look at her brother and believe they're destined to be a knight and a bard who battle evil. She can believe she's found the thing she's been made for.Hazel lives with her brother, Ben, in the strange town of Fairfold where humans and fae exist side by side. The faeries' seemingly harmless magic attracts tourists, but Hazel knows how dangerous they can be, and she knows how to stop them. Or she did, once.At the center of it all, there is a glass coffin in the woods. It rests right on the ground and in it sleeps a boy with horns on his head and ears as pointy as knives. Hazel and Ben were both in love with him as children. The boy has slept there for generations, never waking.Until one day, he does...As the world turns upside down and a hero is needed to save them all, Hazel tries to remember her years spent pretending to be a knight. But swept up in new love, shifting loyalties, and the fresh sting of betrayal, will it be enough?

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    Known as shifters, they materialize from parallel timelines, bringing with them a mysterious drug called slip which breaks down the boundary between what is and what might have been, and offers the desperate and the dispossessed the tantalizing possibility of escape. When a shifter-led gang commits murder in the name of the old Norse pantheon and then uses slip to escape justice, Charles and his girlfriend Jaz decide to cross to another universe themselves in a bid to confront the problem at source and prevent their own society from degenerating into tyranny.But is that Charles' real motive? Or does he have other reasons which even he can't clearly see?