You don’t fully appreciate how large a donkey’s head is until it’s beside you in a Fiat Punto. The view in my mirror was furry and violent. I was driving blind.

Driving with a donkey stuffed in the back seat; jackdaws pecking brains out through the roof of a confessional box; cat piss and astronauts. This is the world not as you see it, but as it is, twisted from the maverick mind of Blindboyboatclub. These are stories of the strange unsettlings in the souls of men caught in between the past and the possible; stories of heart-blinding rage and disquieting compassion.

Taking its title from a twelfth-century English manuscript of the same name, which dehumanised the people and culture of Ireland to facilitate domination, Topographia Hibernica is a collection that unravels the knotted threads of humanity, nature and colonisation from a contemporary Irish perspective. Called ‘one of the most gifted writers of his generation’ by the Irish Times, Blindboyboatclub is the essential voice for the Irish condition in the twenty-first century. Topographia Hibernica is his unmissable new short-story collection.