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p. Fruit bowls are strange things. I’m quite a keen fruit consumer, but however much I eat, there always seem to be one or two pieces of fruit which decompose quietly at the bottom of the bowl. Today I discovered an ominous looking kiwi fruit lurking at the bottom, and gingerly picked it up. It squished in a worrying way, and then actually fizzed. It sounded like an alka-seltzer dropped in water—that’s a serious level of fermentation. For a mercifully brief moment, I toyed with the idea of drinking the juice to see if it had produced a decent kiwi hooch. A particularly painful memory of some banana wine I once tasted surfaced just in time, and I threw the fruit in the bin. A luck escape, I think.

p. This is my second or third reading of this book, and I still feel drawn to it, which should tell you something about how extraordinary it is. ‘Pollen’ is a kind of sequel to ‘Vurt’ (his first novel), and it expands on some of the odd things mentioned only briefly in that book. But even if you haven’t read ‘Vurt’ the story stands on its own very well, has an exciting, twisted plot, as well as one of my favourite fictional heroines of all time.

p. Boda (short for Boadicea) is an Xcab driver, who rides around Manchester in her cab called Charrie (short for Chariot). Her hair is shaved off, and she has a map of Manchester tattooed all over her body and scalp. Xcabs form a hive mind, literally forming the map of the city as they travel around. Xcabbers have their memories wiped and their heads shaved when they join, so Boda can remember nothing about her pre-cabian life. At the opening of the book, her lover-to-be, Coyote—a rogue black-cab driver, and half-dog—is killed after picking up a mysterious young girl called Persephone as a fare. Boda sets off to find out who killed him, and in the process has to let go of everything she has known and break free of the Xcab hive.

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