This is an unusual anthology which is (deliberately) difficult to categorise. The best all-round definition of the stories might be ‘speculative fiction’ which covers a lot of ground between capital-L Literature and the wilder realms of fantasy / sci-fi.
Some of the stories are excellent e.g. the very British and wonderfully eccentric The Prime Importance of a Happy Number, but too many others are long-winded or pointless (quite literally – they just stop in the middle). Whether this is because they are samples of larger works or just a literary pretension is unclear as all the summaries of the authors and their work are lumped together at the end instead of attached to the stories themselves as usual. I never got round to reading the summaries (it’s too fiddly going backwards and forwards on a Kindle and by the time I got to the end I couldn’t be bothered).
For me the real test of an anthology is whether I would go looking for other works by the writers – in this respect CP5 fails the test and I won’t be reading any more volumes in the series.
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