Above the Fat

At the top of a high-rise tower, buffeted by a gale, a desperate man clings onto a ledge and feels the passing minutes drag out into eternity. In a city swallowed by rising floodwaters, two friends embark on a leisurely stroll while the surging waves lick at their heels. A struggling entrepreneur stakes his future years on a plantation of trees that won't reach maturity for a decade; a browbeaten bachelor stews over a lifetime's disappointments in the moments it takes him to knot a tie; and when an arrogant chef devotes precisely two minutes to frying the perfect egg, he realises, as the seconds tick down, that dementia has robbed his father of half a century's worth of memories. Step inside the twilit realm of Thomas Chadwick: a place where the flow of time stalls and swells, halts and hastens, in utterly unpredictable ways. Urgent demands collide with outbreaks of eerie calm, stretches of idleness dovetail with sudden insistence on action, and an inertia without end can bloom from the limbo between the delayed departure of a boat and the arrival of cataclysmic climate change. Combining lyricism with absurdity and biting humour, and finding poignancy in slippages between past, present, and foreboding future, Chadwick's stories conjure up rare magic and cast a disorienting spell. Placid evenings distend into weeks of trouble before sundown, months of anxiety are distilled into a single heartbeat, and, from dawn to dusk, the duration of an entire day is neatly contained within the covers of a book.