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A man arrives in an industrial city in winter with his five-year-old daughter and is drawn by elements of the new surroundings into a search. As his interest accumulates, the search doubles as an atmospheric chronicle of a working-class neighbourhood. Landlords, pawn brokers, house-flippers, immigration businesses, day-labour agencies, ostensible orphan-serving agencies, and police, all hound the local residents. The man’s daughter sees and hears things that he does not, and telephone calls from his grandmother contain obscure fragments of family history. Told episodically, Metal Mirror branches into the intermittent narratives of various locals: a woman in a black shawl, a teenager in a red parka, a tall man, a detective, a clairvoyant. When the central narrator stumbles onto a scene in a local club, a story that could draw these characters together comes into focus.

Influenced by experimental literature in which images, memories, and dialogue fragments combine in unusual ways, and taking up elements of socialist fiction and the detective novel, Metal Mirror mixes themes of personal excavation, neglect, and regional connection to create a work of vividly atmospheric and socially critical literary fiction.