Conville & Walsh

Who shapes your life? The people you know or the people you don’t?

This is the story of a mother, a benign stalker, and a babysitter who wants a new nose; a washed-up comedian, an Indian waiter, and a sociopathic policeman; a chubby PA, a homesick nanny, a benevolent nurse; a shoplifting sales assistant, a tramp, and a Camden prostitute; an award-winning journalist and a murderer.

It’s a story about a world where – whether you know it or not, and usually you don’t – you are only ever two steps away from death or redemption. In short, it is a story about us, and the world we all live in.

In SMALL WORLD, Matt builds a entirely contemporary and engrossing page-turning saga which explores universal themes love, death, friendship, marriage, madness and redemption but unifies them through unfolding question that runs through all the stories and acts as the key connecting all the disparate elements in the novel, which is whether we can ever be truly in control of our own destinies or whether our real lives are entirely shaped by random events and unknown people.