Discover this brooding collection of short stories from one of Britain's finest writers. A world where everyday life crackles with the electricity sparking between men and women, between parents and children, between friends.

A son confesses to his mother that he is cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with her lecturer and embarks on an affair with a man in the pub who looks just like him. Young mothers pent-up in childcare dream treacherously of other possibilities; a boy becomes aware of the woman, a guest at his parents' holiday home, who is pressing up too close against him on the beach.

Hidden away inside the present, the past is explosive; the future can open unexpectedly out of any chance encounter; ordinary moments are illuminated with lightning flashes of dread or pleasure. These stories about family life are somehow undomesticated and dangerous.

'She is the writer we didn't know we were waiting for, until she arrived' Anne Enright, Guardian