His farmers and labourers are living hard-bitten lives in harsh and often impossibly difficult circumstances.
They move gracefully back and forth between different places and different — often impossibly distant — times.
But through this realist tapestry, the author threads a singular, impossibly fantastic idea, often one drawn from the playbook of science fiction, fantasy and horror.
In poor farming communities such as Aschekeri, a kebele in Amhara region, northern Ethiopia, health services are often impossibly far away and it can be difficult to keep disease at bay.
With their often impossibly elevated views, their deep optical fields (boats on the horizon are as clear as the figures on the beach below us) and tiered perspectives, Hiroshige's prints are both captivating and devious.
A Penn print is often impossibly refined; his densest portraits, whether of Paris pastry cooks or of Asaro mud men in New Guinea, tend to take advantage of the platinum-palladium process, which builds up a classical wealth of deep and sculpted tones.
Worse still, early versions of WebTV's software didn't fully support the full range of tricks web designers employ, so the pages were often impossibly skewed and confused.
A week or two spent revelling in the languid luxury of Goa's sunny sosegado, or susegad, two Portuguese colonial-era terms roughly translated as "laid-backness", should not be missed on any hectic visit to mammoth, fascinating, often impossibly frenetic India.
The final results are impossibly poignant and often heartbreakingly beautiful.
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