Valid, Virtual, Vegetable Reality

Fiction. This is a distinctive, urban voice, which holds on to speaking and feeling throughout states of fragmentariness... T]he various figures, situations, scenes and would-be-meanings cracking with violent variety, unassimilable chasms in friendship, unnameable proximities, and tender moments of weird connexion. Even if you have not lived lives resembling those depicted here, whether their worlds of work or experimentation, you know that these lives are aspects of yours. As the Melita Hume Prize is for a first full-length collection, it seems good to award it to a book which makes reading feel like a fresh adventure.--Vahni Capildeo