The Separate Heart - Hardcover

If there is a thread running through Simon Robson's brilliant collection of stories it is the notion of separateness - of adults from each other, of children from adult knowledge, of adult consciousness from the vividness of childhood.

His protagonists are often unlikely - a cat, a man, met in a bar, who drove a chariot in Ben Hur, a girl who gets up very early - but these stories are satisfyingly long and devoid of modernist trickery; rather they are wise, funny, beautifully observed and somehow utterly true.

Simon Robson was born in 1966 and grew up in Wiltshire. He studied at Cambridge University and trained as an actor at RADA. He has since worked extensively in the theatre with such companies as Shared Experience, Method and Madness, Bristol Old Vic and the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre, where his first play, The Ghost Train Tattoo was premiered.

He lives in London with the singer Sophie Daneman and their two sons.