How to Take a Lawnmower Home on the Tube and Other Absurd Acts of Everyday Survival

How to Take a Lawnmower Home on the Tube and Other Absurd Acts of Everyday Survival is a sparkling collection of 46 sharply observed, darkly funny, and deeply moving tales from Heather Walker. With wry wit and a touch of magic, these stories explore the messy intersections of everyday life, memory, desire, and absurdity.

Meet the elderly woman who engineers a kitchen fire just to see her handsome neighbour again. Listen as the sea heaves with sickness, choked by human waste. Watch as two pranksters are outwitted by their own terrifying hoax in a moonlit forest. And travel through time with ghostly siblings reunited by a battered tin box full of memories.

Whether set in cramped city flats, icy tundras, suburban kitchens or spectral post-war warehouses, Walker’s characters are ordinary people in extraordinary moments-facing loss, reinvention, and the uncanny with humour and grit.

This eclectic anthology ranges from poetic vignettes to twist-filled narratives, each capturing a slice of life refracted through imagination. Readers will laugh, gasp, and sometimes ache as they meet a clairvoyant who didn’t see it coming, a woman who merges with a machine, and a man whose mattress knows more than it should.

Perfect for lovers of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected and Miranda July’s offbeat realism, this is a book to savour story by story. Surprising, soulful and subversive, it will leave you questioning what’s real, what’s possible-and what your lawnmower might say if only it could talk.