Ian Sansom is back with another antidote to the festive season with this brilliant collection of short stories, filled with those same emotions we feel year upon year in the most trying and joyous of months – anticipation, frustration, despair and ecstasy. December Stories II will make you laugh, cry and question everything you thought you knew about Christmas, Yuletide, the winter solstice, etcetera. In these stories, Sansom’s vivid and varying characters peel back the many layers of the winter month, from a lonely mother to a guardian angel, a pest-controller to a ‘bar-bar-bar owning brother’ to a baker selling lockdown sourdough kits, these snippets of lives are revealing and beautifully familiar. With the cynical wit and emotional insight we’ve come to expect from Sansom, get ready to fall in love with this mind of winter, and you might begin to wonder, are December Stories becoming a tradition? ‘Happy, Merry, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.’

With illustrations by award winning illustrator Fruzsina Czech.