Second paragraph of third story (“Black Isle”):

Every morning, day breaks over the mudflats, covered in osprey corpses and unexpected bluish reflections, as if a hundred will-o-the-wisps of the wrong colour were advancing over the watery surface. The smooth flat mirror of the mudflats shines indigo: fluorescent, freakish, wrong. From their beaks, and from sores on their chests and bellies, there pours a tainted viscous liquid that resembles watery gelatine, odourless and sticky to the touch.

I got this collection back in 2019 when one of the stories, ‘Kingfisher’, was on the BSFA shortlist. I wrote then of “Kingfisher”:

A very different, grim story of a relationship breaking down in a near future world where we have had environmental catastrophe and yet middle-class struggle against harsh economic reality continues, as does the battle against patriarchy. Vividly realised and tautly told. 

It got my second preference (my first pref went to Time Was, by Ian McDonald, which won).

The collection as a whole addresses human relationships in the coming environmental apocalypse, and does that from an impressive variety of different angles. (There are a couple of exceptions but this covers most of them.) I was hooked with the very first story, “Orange Dogs”, set in a devastated Cambridge where books have almost vanished and babies come with huge difficulty. It’s a tremendous short body of work, containing more than half of Womack’s short fiction to date (and she has another collection coming out). You can get it here.

This was the sf book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next up is What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah.