Twenty-one short stories from award-winning writer Wendy James, ranging from the vignette to the compact epic, the suburban kitchen to the outback and the world, an instant to a lifetime and beyond.

A stay-at-home father is consumed by his frustrations. In Salzburg, a fortepiano maker struggles to preserve his family. Generations of women recall the family matriarch-was she really a witch? And in a kaleidoscopic tour de force, a young mother finds herself on the run with a desperate criminal.

These are stories about memory and perspective, patterns and deviations, longing and escape: a glittering collection from a master of the form.