Stolen Love Behaviour

John's second collection consolidates his reputation as one of the most unusual and intelligent imaginations now at work, and will build on the astonishing success of Panoramic Lounge-Bar, winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. It's a mature book, with more lyricism and allusion than PLB, but no less witty for it; powerful, moving and sometimes disturbing, it's a journey through a labyrinth of memory, history and strange anecdote, written in Stammers's trademark style -- literary yet hip and immediate, with a real steetwise vibe, often English in its forms but transatlantic in its voice, and never less than wholly rivetting.