There’s plenty of love, sex and travel in Rodge Glass’s collection of short, smart, sassy stories, but not much music. One of the best of them, however, is set in the Jazzrock Blues bar in Cracow, where the atmosphere of disillusion, cynicism and impending doom is worthy of Roberto Bolaño. In another good story, a gormless oven-salesman hero is transfixed by the hips of a singer in a tourist bar in Tunisia. The stories are mostly concerned with travel and the plight of the ignorant tourist relying on Lonely Planet during the day and booze at night to cope with a foreign land. Some are excellent; others are interesting sketches. Behind the vulgar or stupid or simply innocent behaviour of Glass’s tourists there is often a core of real affection: a girlfriend back home is missed; a deceased and much-loved partner is recalled; a lonely English widower is prevented from bleeding to death in Toronto; a widow, lusting after a handsome African beach boy, remembers her beloved husband.
