10 stories about smoking

Always a sucker for a book jacket that has the wow factor, one that does so by brazenly flouting current social etiquettes is likely to appeal to me even more. And so to Stuart Evers' Ten Stories about Smoking which looks, as you might have guessed, like a rather stylish giant cigarette packet, and which is filled with ten smoky tales metaphorically sucked through the filter of a cigarette, a cigarette that's both tantalisingly tangential and central to each of the plots.


Flicking back the flip top of a (quasi-contraband) giant cigarette packet in an enclosed public space inevitably has its thrills (for me, anyway), and so I did it, not only did it, but loved doing it - right there, on the tube, in plain sight of everyone; I eased out the stories from the packet, and it gave me an illicit buzz. But that's where the gimmick ended...

The stories don't disappoint, far from it - inhaling each story is a hauntingly wonderful experience; each muses with pensive melancholy on life - on love, betrayal, destruction and seduction - and circumnavigates the central tenet that there's a certain empty (and destructive?) hollowness lurking at the centre of human emotion and existence, however intense or robust they may seem. Much like a cigarette itself. Moving and thought provoking, there's a beautiful delicacy to the way these tales of disaffection burn down to the filter, searing to the core of fragile human sensitivity like a butt stubbed out on the flesh.

The book's launch party, open to the public and on from 7.30pm - 10.30pm, Wed 23rd at The Queen of Hoxton, £5, should be an amazing event with artists from the worlds of film, theatre, music and spoken word reinterpreting the 10 stories...