The voices in this collection speak from the most unlikely of locations: the British-Jamaican queen of chic who hosts, reluctantly, from her premises in Suzhou, China, the Biblio-Bar International Literary Festival. In Bandar Seri Begawan, there is the young Englishman who falls in love with a rich Bruneian murderess, and can never leave. Then, there is the past, that other country we so seldom manage to escape, as in the tale of Charlie Moncrief, the ruined libertine, reduced to servitude by the man he once teased mercilessly.

Red Flags, is a lucky dip into the extremities of life. Whatever you fish out, like life itself, might not be quite what you bargained for.