Writing both of imagined characters and as "I", Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw's stories deal with the experiences of loss, disappointment and the attempt to be self-truthful. In the sequence of stories that chart childhood family memory and the break-up of those connections through deaths and the passage of time, there is a fine balance between recording the feelings of desolation and the pleasures of reconstructing the joys of the past through art and memory. There is, too, in the collection as a whole, a richly consoling passage towards a sense of continuance and human resilience,