This is a wonderfully acerbic collection, full of dark humour, which captures the casual brutality of its characters’ everyday lives. Her settings range from Maine and Nantucket to the Southwest and into Mexico and Guatemala and her stories illustrate the ways in which her characters seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. One critic has written ‘a brilliant spawn of Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor, Joy Williams blends mordant wit, uncanny characters, and weirdly familiar landscapes and locales … By turns these narratives soothe, then surprise, then shock with jolts of recognition, recoil, and naked redemption.’

Vintage Contemporaries | Paperback / softback 213 pp. |ISBN: 9781400095520