When 9-year-old Rose Edelstein bites into her mother's home-made lemon chocolate cake, to her horror, she discovers she can taste her mother's emotions in the slice. And her mother - her cheerful, can-do mother - tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly food becomes perilous.

When Mona Gray is ten, her father contracts a mysterious illness. When she becomes a maths teacher, Mona delights her pupils by encouraging them to find objects that take the form of numbers.

These stories of men and women whose lives are shaped and sometimes twisted by the power of extraordinary desires take us to a place far beyond the imagination.

Aimee Bender's 'Willful Creatures' conjures a fantastical world in which authentic love blooms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman's children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, a Richard and Judy bookclub pick, returns with a wonderful collection of enchanting, strange and magical stories. In this collection, Bender's unique talents sparkle brilliantly in stories about people searching for connection through love, sex and family - while navigating the often painful realities of their lives. A woman plays out a prostitution fantasy with her husband in 'The Red Ribbon' and finds she cannot go back to her old sex life. An ugly woman marries an ogre in 'The Devouring' and struggles to decide...