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Award-winning Charlotte Grimshaw's remarkable collection of intertwined short stories. Richly detailed, vivid with local colour, each story in this book is an inspection of human motive and of the complex ties that bind five principal characters together. The stories cover a wide range of territory, from childhood innocence to adult desperation, from the depths of poverty to cushioned affluence, from London to Los Angeles, Ayers Rock in Australia to the black sand beaches of New Zealand's wild west coast. The stories can be read as discrete pieces, yet each contributes to a unifying narrative, which also links back to her previous work Opportunityand forward to her subsequent works, The Night Bookand Soon. Both Singularityand Opportunitywere shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Prize, and the latter won New Zealand's premier award for fiction, the 2008 Montana Book Award.