Under the Dam

*WINNER of the BBC National Short Story Prize 2010** One of the Books of 2005 in The Independent and The Guardian. In the middle of a speech a businessman realises his soul has just left his body. In an Athens marketplace, a jealous lover finds himself staggering through a vision of hell. High in the Alps, a young woman s body re-appears in the glacier, perfectly preserved, where she fell 50 years before. Entering Constantine's stories is like stepping out into a wind of words, a swarm of language. His prose is as fluid as the water that surges and swells through all his landscapes. Yet, against this fluidity, his stories are able to stop time, to freeze-frame each protagonist's life just at the moment when the past breaks the surface, or when the present - like the dam of the title - collapses under its own weight.