A new collection of stories—dazzling, poignant, wickedly
funny, and highly addictive—by the internationally acclaimed
writer whose work The Times (London) calls “dangerously
close to perfection.” These thirteen stories brilliantly
focus on aspects of contemporary living and unerringly
capture a generation, a type, a social class, a pattern of
behavior. They give us the small detail that reveals large
secrets and summons up the inner stresses of our lives (“It
is a blissful relief to turn to the coolness and clarity of
Helen Simpson . . . She is, to my mind, the best short story
writer now working in English” —Ed Crooks, Financial Times).
Whether her subject is single women or wives in stages of
midlife-ery, marriage or motherhood, youth, young love,
homework, or history, Simpson writes near to the bone and
close to the heart.
In one story, a squirrel trapped under a dustbin lid in the
back garden vanishes, and a woman’s marriage is revealed in
the process . . . In another, a young woman on her way for
an MRI reflects on new love, electromagnetism, and Sherlock
Holmes, and afterward goes to a museum and finds herself
wanting to escape into one of the paintings.
And in the title story, two men on a flight from London to
Chicago—one an elderly scientist, the other a businessman
upgraded to first class—discuss climate change and what
flying is doing to “our shrunken planet,” this while the
“in-flight entertainment” shows the crop-duster scene from
Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. When a passenger in the seat
across the aisle suddenly becomes ill and dies, the plane is
forced to land in Goose Bay, Labrador, to the utter
frustration of the two men. In the story’s moment of
reckoning, one of the men, furious at the delay, says to the
other, “I don’t care about you. You don’t care about me. We
don’t care about him [the deceased passenger]. We all know
how to put ourselves first, and that’s what makes the world
go round.”
These darkly comic, brave, and, says The Guardian, “deeply
unsentimental” stories brilliantly evoke life’s truest
sensations—love, pain, joy, and grief—and give us, with
precision and complex economy, a shrewd and painfully true
glimpse into our dizzying 3-D age.
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