<p><b>JM Originals is a new list for fresh and distinctive new writing; for books that provoke and entertain.</b></p><p> </p><p> The twelve stories in this startling collection range over centuries and across the world.</p><p> </p><p> There are stories about those who are lonely, or estranged, or out of time. There are hauntings, both literal and metaphorical; and acts of cruelty and neglect, but also of penance.</p><p> </p><p> Some stories concern themselves with the present, and the mundane circumstances in which people find themselves: a woman who feels stuck in her life imagines herself in different jobs - as a lighthouse keeper in Wales, or as a guard against polar bears in a research station in the Arctic.</p><p> </p><p> Some stories concern themselves with the past: a sixteenth-century alchemist and doctor, whose arrogance blinds him to people's dissatisfaction with their lives until he experiences it himself.</p><p> </p><p> Finally, in the title story, a sailor gives his account - violent, occasionally funny and certainly tragic - of the decline of the Great Auk.</p>