Haunting and fresh, shot through with empathy and humour, Pasha Malla's deceptively smooth, brilliant stories grant us entry into fascinating worlds - the forbidden, complex world of children acting out half-understood fantasies of adulthood; the familiar, modern world of young couples navigating hairpin emotional turns; a near-future world where Niagara Falls has run dry; a long-past world where a frustrated chess-master unwittingly invents a sinister machine that will affect the lives of generations to come.

As in the extraordinary stories of writers such as Lorrie Moore, Haruki Murakami, George Saunders, and Barbara Gowdy, Pasha Malla offers us characters who are recognizable and situations that are familiar, and then peels back layers to reveal the strange, the wondrous, and the unexpected. The Withdrawal Method is an assured and mature first collection from one of our best young writers, one who pairs striking emotional depth with remarkable technical skill.