A woman remembers the early days of new parenthood, two brothers reunite in Poland after a lifetime of separation, a hotel worker lets love into her life only to have it snatched away by the immigration department and two Western Sydney women invite Magda Szubanski for afternoon tea…

‘Between the subtle gestures and dissimulations of the ordinary people that populate these short stories of contemporary life in Australia and abroad is a dramatic contestation between the desire to forget the traumas of the past and the necessity of coming to terms with their ongoing consequences. Tender and tremulous as half-forgotten heartache, these stories of estranged fathers, grieving daughters, and lonesome lovers desperate for genuine connection are written in a quicksilver prose by a born storyteller possessed with a poet’s eye for the vivifying moments that make our collective life worth living.’
LUKE CARMAN, award-winning author of An Elegant Young Man and Intimate Antipathies