Emily Perkins captures perfectly the intense world of love, art and waitressing in this debut collection of short stories. She brings modern life into harsh and comic focus with a cinematic vision for character and dialogue and a cast of young and painfully vulnerable metropolitans.

'A stunning first collection: addictive, smart, scary, wise and profoundly funny. Perkins has the enviable Alice Munro knack of crafting tiny stories with the scope of novels, characters who convince within a paragraph, dialogue which stings with its unresolved sadness and comfortless truths' Julie Myerson