The characters in this collection are often dislocated, outsiders looking for something more from their experience - some finding it, some learning from it, some losing it. The stories are blackly humorous, twisting the reader towards an offbeat kind of compassion that lives in the heart for days.

'I now see why I like your stories so much: they do a Brechtian thing - that is, they resist sentimentality and faux romanticism by stripping away much of the artifice we construct to create stories about ourselves and others. They are unsettling and "defamiliarising" as was Brecht's way,...