Josie’s writing, just like her stand up, glitters with a joyful bemusement at the hilarity, sadness and peculiarity of being human. They are at pains to accept the cruelty of a world whose laws are unchangeable (“How can the past be the only place you can’t travel back to?

I really hope this isn't the end of Josie Long's writing career and that there's more where this came from!

The strangeness of lockdown Britain is depicted with biting accuracy in “We Decided to Leave London” – both capturing the coded unpleasantness of a neighbourhood group chatting online and the quiet desperation of a person for fresh air and solitude. Sometimes the momentum is so slow I lost interest but when she gets it right, the ending takes on resonance and lingers like the best stories do. That’s the best thing, just to keep trying different things, having a taste of everything and trying to enjoy it. Also I’m somebody who didn’t have a strong connection with nature growing up and discovering it has been life changing.

Cocker argues that by understanding – or at least investigating – the beautiful mystery of a bird almost always in flight, we can better comprehend our own place in the world. She won the Best Newcomer award at Edinburgh Fringe Festival and has been nominated three times for Best Show.There are also times you want Long to imbue important moments with more detail, and slow the pace, so the reader can really feel what's being portrayed. There's also Long's occasional glitch where the story explains itself to the reader, the way a radio essay or stand-up routine might make its message explicit - in a couple of the stories here it feels heavy-handed (not least because some of the stories have italicised sections at the end explaining the sources and quotes the ideas come from.

Opening up this book is like skinny-dipping in the brain of a genius – I never wanted to come up for air. Short stories can sometimes be hard to fulfill because they always give you a taste and end before you're satisfied, but that's not a problem for Josie. Josie's writing is everything I love about her stand-up: sharp and smart, hilarious and incisive, infused with love for the world and the complicated people who live in it. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.And indeed, occasional point-of-view characters are male, like the schoolboy whose determinedly no-nonsense, TED talk-listening dad is cutting him off from the artier, less dreadful side of his family.