Migrants, immigrants, travellers, and holidaymakers feature in Dylan Thomas Prize-winner Rachel Trezise's second collection of short fiction: in eleven dazzling stories of lives lived on either side of boundaries, and on the fringes of society, is teeming with unforgettable characters whose dreams, yearnings and regrets are at once unique and universal. Orthodox Jewish teenager Levi, having been caught fishing pornography from a waste bin in a Brooklyn Park, is sent to reform school in Israel, his simple pious existence threatened when he meets moon-faced nymphomaniac Tzippy, resident of a nearby psychiatric hospital. Lonely seven-year-old third generation Northern Irish-Italian, Majella, finds solace in her collection of Barbie dolls when her father is murdered by terrorists and her mother is floored by grief, learning to deal with the horrors of the world through child's play. East German opera aficionado, Silke, faces a life-changing decision when she wakes to find her American lover, Michael, stranded on the opposite side of an impenetrable but hastily thrown-up wall.
Here, deep tragedy rubs shoulders with sharp comedy as children come of age and adults come to terms.
