'The pond on the Common froze in the night. Thirteen ducks were caught by they feet.  The big dog came along and bit each bird off at knee.  Later the sight of a stubble of duck's stumps poking through the ice like a five o'clock shadow was to fracture Hazel's morning..'  So begins this extraordinary story of life lived in South London.  Here we meet the out-of-work designer Moss, her young son Elvis and her lover Hazel from Goodiwindi, Australia, scraping their living from the DHSS and a spot of moonlighting on the side.  Then Moss's ex-husband, Harold, tips up, pursued by the orange-robed cult he has abandoned, while Hazel's ex-husband Le Professeur de Judo, begins to think of her murderously back in Vancouver.  We meet Walter, too, walking his dog Angst on Clapham Common; his novelist wife, Daphne, an their motley collection of children.  And there are Buster and Beulah from the Women's Design Collective, their offspring a result of the milman's sperm donation in a yoghurt carton (swapped for a rare Beatles' bootleg). Finally, there is the Bogeyman with his chipped junkie eyes who Elvis watches and shadows, dizzy with love.  As the sun rises and sets beyond the distant tower blocks, as the sky turns lavender over Battersea and snow falls on the Common, the balances of people's lives shift and strain...    A bizarre black comedy of contemporary urban life, Broken Words is written with sparse elegance and a fierce wit.