Fugues on a Funny Bone

Witty, poignant and penetrating, Jan Woolf's stories - or fugues, as she likes to think of them - take the reader on an episodic journey through the linked lives of children and adults in a London Pupil Referral Unit. From a Hackney towpath to a day trip to Albania, she covers subjects as disparate as physics, communism and pornography. Read separately they are a delight - read sequentially they chart the developing relationship between two adults, themselves struggling with interior lives not unlike the children they attempt to educate in a contemporary climate of cant and management speak. Images of sculptures by Richard Niman accompany the stories, acting as dramatic visual stepping stones between them.