In a remote Australian settlement a young wife with an untellable secret reluctantly invites her neighbour into her home. A Quaker spinster offers companionship to a condemned man in a Colorado jail. In the ice and snows of Siberia an office employee from Birmingham witnesses a scene that will change her life. At a jubilee celebration in a northern English town a middle-aged alderman opens his heart to Queen Victoria. A teenage daughter leaves home in search of adventure. High in the Cumbrian fells a woman seeks help from her father''s enemy. Spare, precise, charged with a prickly wit, the stories in Carys Davies''s sparkling second collection remind us how little we know of the lives of others. "extraordinarily powerful" - VS PRITCHETT PRIZE JUDGES JANE GARDAM, PENELOPE LIVELY AND JACOB ROSS "darkly funny and unsettling" -BOYD TONKIN The Independent on Some New Ambush "As if Mark Twain and Annie Proulx had sat down at a desk together [....] I shall be looking out for more." -PIERS PLOWRIGHT "a writer willing to tackle the hardest of all fictional forms - the short story. This is a region in which so many fail [...] she can do what it is essential to do in this form, she can create a micro-world, which has reverberations beyond its size and scope, which is metaphysical." -SARAH HALL