Throughout the media, Colette Paul's debut on the literary scene has been hailed as the birth of a startling new talent. In her unsettling, insightful and thoroughly poised collection of short stories she writes with freshness and vigour. A young woman goes to see the father who left her when she was a baby and ends up having to have a look at him in his coffin, a little girl watches from the top bunk as her older sister gets ready to go out, disappointed schoolgirls lie in wait for flashers, a woman takes her ill child with her on a hot date ...There are echoes of the wit of a young Muriel Spark in these contemporary tales of modern lives, a way of twisting the mundane to make it seem extraordinary.