Showing results by author "C J Parsons" in All Categories

With more than 10 stories from exciting new voices and a few veterans of the universe, the second anthology highlights the lives and struggles of humanity's best and worst years after system advent.

Heather thought she’d been left behind in life, until she won a place in the luxurious ‘Triple F’ lottery, where fame, fortune and followers await 12 lucky winners. The rules are simple: live the lifestyle of your dreams and win £5,000 a week for the rest of your life, plus six months of fame on the country’s most popular app – as long as you’re not bottom of the rankings. Lose your followers, and you lose everything. But there’s trouble in paradise.

When five-year-old Sofia is taken from the park, her mother, Carrie, is beside herself with worry. Carrie has a condition which means she struggles to read facial expressions, so she is terrified she missed something that put her daughter in danger. But just days later, Sofia is found unharmed. The police immediately suspect Josh, the man who found Sofia, but with no evidence against him they are forced to let him go without charges. Josh is keen to make sure Sofia is safe and well, and Carrie is charmed by his kindness.

Death and the treatment of the dead body loom large in our collective cultural consciousness. The authors explore the materiality and meaning of the dead body and the living's relationship to it. All the biggest questions facing the planetary human community relate in one way or another to the corpse. Surprisingly, Christian communities are largely missing in the discussion of the dead, having abdicated the historic role in care for the dead to the funeral industry.