A joyful, freewheeling, funny and profound new collection from ‘one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today’ (Lionel Shriver)

A joyful, freewheeling, funny and profound new collection from ‘one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today’ (Lionel Shriver) For one woman, a cross-country train ride becomes a parallel journey into the dark psyche of American manhood. An old man and his neighbour enter strike up a friendship that might a more sinister battle of wits than he first thinks. A man, waiting for his wife in a bar on Valentine's Day, is plagued by a stranger who claims to be clairvoyant. In electric prose T. C. Boyle explores myriad facets of society: greed and excess, parenthood and responsibility, the digital world and the way we understand our mortality. Roaming unrestrainedly through the present and near future, he inhabits his characters’ minds with a ventriloquist’s flair, skewering human motivations and revealing us to ourselves with empathy and wry humour.

"The prolific Boyle continues to have fun and make literary mischief with his latest story collection ... There's no reason why these 13 stories should seem so funny, as most of them confront individual mortality and some sort of cultural collapse. They run the gamut from the subversively real to the surreal in such a way that they blur the distinction between the implausible and the inevitable ... A playful virtuoso with a deadly seriousness of purpose" - Kirkus, Starred Review

"Praise for T. C. Boyle: Some of the best, funniest, bleakest, most unsettling short stories I’ve ever read" - THE TIMES

"Always enjoyable, virtually incapable of dullness or slack sentences … His stories reveal truths about modern life while still feeling beautifully invented" - NEW YORK TIMES