Each story has the general shape of a short story-they begin in one place and leave off in psychically different territory-but their content renders them radically unfamiliar. And the extraordinary prize-winner is indeed a highlight in a curiously clotted collection of stories that feels at times like a narrativised scene from Hieronymus Bosch. You will probably pick up this collection because it contains the short story for which Okojie was awarded the 2020 Caine Prize, ‘Grace Jones’. Okojie writes towards an impulse that too easily lends itself to the threadbare ‘Magical Realism’ descriptor, but which is recognisable as a particular mode nevertheless, and it makes itself felt as such. Nudibranch, the runic third book by Nigerian–British author Irenosen Okojie, follows on from 2016’s Speak Gigantular, but where that collection made its relationship to allegory quite clear, Nudibranch is a disorienting mangrove of allusion and literary experimentalism. Ideally, the surreal should hold up a cracked mirror, through whose crazing we can perceive the squalid weirdness of life.

But stories with no portal for the reader to climb through are first mystifying, then maddening. Accordingly, whether we find a short story satisfying or not depends on how it presents the strange interior world to us-overly legible constructions are not satisfying.

That feeling betrays our longing for the world to be rendered strange, a longing which expresses itself in a desire for mystery.

In these stories Okojie creates worlds where lovelorn aliens abduct innocent coffee shop waitresses, where the London Underground is inhabited by the ghosts of errant Londoners caught between here and the hereafter, where insensitive men cheat on their mistresses and can only muster enough interest to fall for one-dimensional poster girls and where brave young women attempt to be erotically empowered at their own peril.Sexy, serious and at times downright disturbing, this brilliant collection sizzles with originality.Short stories are not innately surreal, though the encounter they stage with uncertainty may generate a feeling we have been taught to understand as the experience of the surreal. Irenosen Okojie's gift is in her understated humour, her light touch, her razor-sharp assessment of the best and worst of humankind, and her unflinching gaze into the darkest corners of the human experience. These stories are captivating, erotic, enigmatic and disturbing. A startling debut short story collection from one of Britain's rising literary stars.

Speak Gigantular by Irenosen Okojie