As is always the case with a collection of stories, I connected more with some than others but I truly enjoyed reading them all - which is quite rare for me. It's heavy, and it's raw, but it's also a beautifully written reminder that everyone has their own shit to deal with, whether they choose to share it or not. The short stories cover a wonderful span of types of people and situations, and all feel real, both for the good, bad and cringeworthy! Instead, Imagine a City becomes a philosophical interrogation of what home means and how we might shape it in our minds to be a place of succour and safety. Each of them is dealing with their own issues and tensions, and I found it fascinating to read about them, even if only briefly.

From her new home in Glasgow, the much-loved standup insists there’s much more to life than sweating on the Central line and doing hand-to-hand combat with the city’s cost-of-living crisis. From a woman who sees an ex-partner on a poster and defaces it, to another inundated by online gossip and gripes, to a guru slash influencer slash con-artist, these are all fractured individuals who are “just about managing” to deal with relentless reality. After a break to study English at Oxford University, she had her Edinburgh fringe debut in 2006 with Kindness and Exuberance, a show that Chortle described as “utterly amateurish…this is a good thing”, disarming audiences with homemade badges, handwritten programmes, shambolic ukelele songs, and jokes about her supervillain persona Deceptive Shrimp.All in all an engaging, sensitively written collection of stories which centre the female experience amid the horrors - but also joys - of modern life. These are the stories where Long fully explores the characters' world and teases its complexities out, giving the protagonist and the reader moments of epiphany.

And the overall state of the UK is that a very small proportion of people extract as much wealth from it as they can. That was so bizarre because the story is about a woman in her forties realising she had this abusive relationship and I wanted to use that as a springboard and examine the feelings I had about it, but it was not going to be that when I started. A stand-up performer since the age of 14, Long has long been known for her golden retriever persona.Opening up this book is like skinny-dipping in the brain of a genius – I never wanted to come up for air. And then there’s another one about a kid in a violent home where it’s mostly hidden and in my life I had experiences of living in a stressful environment, shall we say, and writing it had a kind of nightmarish quality for me. The walls were made of paper and in the story someone makes the mistake of trying to put up shelves and discovering ‘this is just plasterboard, this is not a wall’ and I did do that. Best surely is the piece regarding a charged attack on the upper middle classes, from two young women determined to get their slice.

Or you're the thinks-herself-chubby-and-ugly girl wanting to get in with the cool-but-very-flawed crowd at school, or you're suffering because a guy at a party can't keep it in your trousers, or someone from your past moves in to the neighbourhood, with his current and you have a hard time over you being his ex still, or someone from your past ends up on a nearby billboard you see daily. I’d had my kids and that was so much a part of my life and I care so much about politics I thought it had to be things that I talk about. I loved the little glimpses and vignettes into different worlds and different lives, but if anything the common theme seemed to be a huge underlying anxiety.

Also I’m somebody who didn’t have a strong connection with nature growing up and discovering it has been life changing. This all-you-can-eat approach to life meant that she’s taken on some fearsomely impressive challenges. We Decided to Leave London', for example, hinges in part on a woman's epiphany while watching a fox at night, but it's over too soon, written without the linguistic charge that would have set it apart from the story's less important observational details; 'Poets Rise' has a fantastic, George Saunders-ish conceit (a woman works at a sort of digital spy cops agency, where left-wing people earmarked as 'potential subversives' have their phones hacked and their lives messed with, to break their spirit before they can escalate into activism) but its elements feel like they have more potential than the story gives them, in terms of world-building and in putting the narrator's own life up against her job and the life of the man she's tracking.

It was like this itch that I wanted to scratch but when I started scratching it I was ‘oh, shit, oh no, ha ha, this is awful’. And indeed, occasional point-of-view characters are male, like the schoolboy whose determinedly no-nonsense, TED talk-listening dad is cutting him off from the artier, less dreadful side of his family.You can read this either one story at a time or all at once, and many of these short stories left me wanting more and I would love to read a full-length version of some of these plots. Josie will be joined in conversation for this extra special virtual event where she will explore her inspiration and the writing process for this electric collection of short stories. The new show, Re-Enchantment, covers her turning 40, having her second child, moving to Glasgow and getting diagnosed with ADHD. There’s a neat synergy between standup and short story-writing in the way their carefully constructed snippets of life build to a punchline.