'Kissing you is like new paint and old pain. It is like coffee and car alarms and a dim stairway and a stain and it's like smoke.' ('Placing a Call')
How does love change us? And how do we change ourselves for love - or for lack of it? Ten stories by acclaimed author Deborah Levy explore these delicate, impossible questions. In Vienna, an icy woman seduces a broken man; in London gardens, birds sing in computer start-up sounds; in ad-land, a sleek copywriter becomes a kind of shaman. These are twenty-first century lives dissected with razor-sharp humour and curiosity, stories about what it means to live and love, together and alone.
'These tales of unconventional love reinforce Levy's reputation as a major contemporary writer who never pulls her punches.' - The Independent
'Levy sensitively conveys the phenomenology of textures, of skin and breath. Embedded in her coiled, polished sentences is the drive that pushes us together, and forces us apart.' - TLS
'These ominous, odd, erotic stories burrow deep into your brain'. Financial Times
'A collection of mischievous vignettes of Mitteleuropa.' - Telegraph
'Like their protagonists, these stories are powerful because they are fragmentary, elliptical'. - Guardian
'Levy's pen is a volatile weapon.' - Observer
