"A game between a woman's father and husband simmers and boils into scalding danger; a daughter creates an elaborate feast for her grieving mother; a solar eclipse burns emotions and deceit out into the open; a girl flees across a desert in the pitch-black night. In these stories of suffocating atmosphere, the bland restraint of ordinary life careers into violence and darkness; they are hand grenades thrown at mundanity and the status quo. Foregrounding the voices and experiences of women and children and veering from claustrophobic suburbia to untamed nature and its great vistas of desert and sky, hungry for what focuses on the terror of normality, prising back its veneer of respectability to reveal the hostility and menace seething beneath."--Provided by publisher.