They hadn’t made a guy out of this one, though. They dress the girls up no end in some of these places, velvet tarns and all, making them proper guys. I handed my slip of paper to the usherette and said, “Back row, please,” because I like sitting far back and leaning my head against the board. I like that - proper baby I am for westerns - so I paid my one and twopence and went inside. They asked me if I’d like to go along, but somehow I didn’t fancy barging in, so instead of staying home alone after leaving the garage I went down to the picture palace and, taking a look at the poster, saw it was cowboy and Indian stuff - there was a picture of a cowboy sticking a knife into the Indian’s guts. The Thompsons had gone to see their married daughter up at Highgate. No, I was happy enough living with the Thompsons, carrying on much the same day after day, until that one night, when it happened. I was out in the Middle East, too, Port Said and that. I never had much use for girls, not even when I was doing my time in the Army. I like to get on with my job, and then when the day’s work’s over settle down to a paper and a smoke and a bit of music on the wireless, variety or something of the sort, and then turn in early. (Feb.Source: Daphne Du Maurier, extract from ‘Kiss Me Again, Stranger’ in Kiss Me Again Stranger: A Collection of Eight Stories Long and Short (New York: Doubleday, 1953 ), pp. Penelope dreams of her husband and eldest son's adventures, and with revolution in the air, the questions become, will life get better under a new regime and will she see her loved ones again? At its best, the novel reads like a send up of The Road by a young Kurt Vonnegut, but these moments are few, with Tanner decreasingly interested in imparting significance to the frantic comic absurdities that pile up with alarming speed.

After Penelope slaps the Metal Man for trying to take her oven racks to melt down into munitions, the family goes on the run, seeking refuge in a landfill, surviving as scavengers, and dodging cannibals. Heroine Penelope has 14 children, and her husband and oldest son are away serving in the military, leaving her to contend with regular visits from a grumpy government scrap metal collector.

Tanner's scrappy debut plunges readers into a hyperactive, nonsensical alternate universe in which a family's life is made hell by a government gone nuts.

Kiss me again stranger