The Wireless Reader

How can you tell when a story's done? What if it is missing an ingredient, and not even the writer knows which one? What's the difference between a fiction and a lie? Kate Ellis travels through London and time, and communes with several types of storyteller. Sean Preston serves up sexual revelations, and the secrets behind them. Titania Krimpas finds that it's what's between the lines of a story that really counts.

When we fight, we dance; but what use is a fighter outside the ring? Is knock-down strength a virtue or a liability? And what if the fight has begun, but you don’t know who your opponent is? Under Peter Kunert’s brooding score, Leslie Mapp meets his match in darkened streets; Anna Whitwham anatomises righteous rage and the teaching of a lesson; Ian Green lies with the corpses on the shore.

Love is blind - but we look, just the same. Three writers; three different ways of looking on those whom we are supposed to love. Is the eye the last word in unreliable narration? And maybe it wouldn't matter, were one gazing upon a distant other - but what if its object is someone who's counting on you to get it right? Viv Broughton visits days of changed status and an unstable self. Fiona Yaron-Field strives to understand whether a photographer's child can give consent and asks whether the lens isn't a component of the Mirror Stage. Annie Wilding checks her phone and glimpses a void within.

Poems and prose unite in this selection from the front line and the home front. Chrys Salt MBE, mother to a soldier, crafts poems, at first to find understanding, but ultimately to confront the forces of war. Steven H McGregor served with the US army in Iraq; his subtle fiction depicts vulnerability beneath a macho martial façade. N Quentin Woolf take his reader by the hand and onto the battlefield, to a place where understanding cannot penetrate and words are empty shells. Sometimes sinuous and suggestive, at others towering, the soundtrack is by Peter Kunert.