The world has changed. War rages in South America and China, and Britain is run by an omnipresent dictatorship known simply as The Authority. Assets and weapons have been seized, every movement is monitored and women are compulsorily fitted with contraceptive devices. This is Sister's story of her attempt to escape the repressive regime.
Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles.
The Beautiful Indifference is a collection of intensely erotic and disarming tales, which span centuries, contemporary life and the future, and evoke landscapes as diverse as London's metropolis and lake Vuotjrvi in the Finnish wilderness. A woman who chooses not save her drowning lover. A frustrated housewife who arranges an appointment with the mysterious 'Agency'. A girl enamoured with a notorious Cumbrian horse-breeding family who innocently unleashes their wrath. Each story rotates on an axis of survivalism - natural and medical, physical and sexual - so that wolves and humans alike are exposed and hunted across the pages, then hung like elegant trophies.
