White Time by Margo Lanagan | Book review | Books | The Guardian

I picked this up with a slight sense of temporal displacement – a perfect state of mind in which to read a collection of short stories from the winner of the 2009 World Fantasy Award (for the brilliantly surreal Tender Morsels). White Time predates that book by nearly a decade and has only now been published in the UK as "new".

There is a great deal to admire about these stories, not least the author's terse, angular prose and her extraordinary talent for creating hybrid worlds. As in the best fantasy and science fiction, the characters and settings are familiar enough to resonate emotionally while remaining wholly other; Lanagan's vision of the world skews effortlessly towards the seriously weird.