Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

A Greek woman who puts on her lipstick to go to the cemetery to tell off the dead. A gay couple who, in scouring the atlas for possible locations for a country cottage, regard Estonia as "a kind of very, very outer London suburb". The Jamaican woman who returns home twice a year to luxuriate in the "real" house she has built there but cannot bear to live in full time. The church organist who keeps every greetings card she has ever been sent, delving for the meanings in every commercial set of verses. The man who says he grieves constantly over the ghosts of the seventy left dead when, as a mercenary, he blew up an arms dump; he seeks consolation in online pornography. The woman in her early twenties who is tattoed and pierced in every conceivable place, and sees pain as part of her "sense of control" of her life.