Picked this up on a complete whim whilst spending a joyful Saturday stalking the shelves of the local library and I am so glad I did. This volume travels across ten short stories encompassing the futility and contradiction of modern life and how it affects each of us, physically and mentally, and where it may ultimately lead. The heavy message of the stories is balanced by the simplicity of the illustration that use basic line drawings and single colours to distinguish between each separate tale. All of the stories are superb but for me I found 976 sq ft and Million Year Boom particularly poignant, the former as it speaks to the changing urban landscape and how isolated this can make us (more poignant for me as I live in a small block of flats with little communication with my neighbours) and the latter given the current trend towards trying to put a monetary value of the natural world as the only way we can determine its value and protect it (as an ecologist this is a concept I struggle with but understand given man's need to 'value' everything). A superb commentary on modern life.