Pert, tart, often perfect stories from the eastern seaboard of the USA. Every one of these stories is knowing, wry, sad, funny, engaging, full of unexpected detail, perceptive in the extreme. Heidi Jon Schmidt has an ear for dialogue, but more so for what is unsaid, for the huge chasms of unspoken communication in everyday life. Her heroes are the ever-so-slightly left-of-centre misfits, who are certain there is something missing from their lives but can’t quite work out what. Whether her subject is an eleven-year-old girl grieving for her dog, a middle-aged man whose wife has left him and must return to live with his mother, an elderly lady whose husband has Alzheimers, a ninety-year-old revered poet, a group of talentless but wildly enthusiastic would-be novelists, she invests them with a credibility that makes one care passionately for them.