We Were Strangers: Stories Inspired by Unknown Pleasures

Joy Division remain one of Britain's most influential and best-loved bands, their music as dramatic and compelling now as when they first appeared almost forty years ago. Unknown Pleasures, their debut album, is their definitive document, a brooding, thrilling record whose cryptic contents have haunted the imaginations of generations of listeners.The ten new stories in We Were Strangers, each of which takes its title and inspiration from a song on the album, offer an original, distinctive and wide-ranging response.A man receives a knock on the door from a neighbour with a curious obsession: he wants to buy all the garages on the street. A solider, recently returned from a war, meets his son’s new stepfather and finds himself wanting to talk about the mysterious dreams which plague him. A woman awakes in an unfamiliar room, a stranger covered in blood beside her. Why is she unable to remember how she got there? And why does her companion seem so familiar?Featuring new fiction from Jenn Ashworth, Anne Billson, David Gaffney, Jessie Greengrass, Zoe Lambert, Toby Litt, Sophie Mackintosh, Louise Marr, Nicholas Royle and Eley Williams, and taking in tales of isolation and anxiety, but also ecstasy and otherworldly adventure, We Were Strangers lights a path through the nocturnal territory mapped out in Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures.