A woman sees dante everywhere; karl runs and runs and cannot recapture his lost love; celine, a thai trans-woman, falls for an artist who is infatuated with her as he is with ian fairweather; an ex-con travels to germany to meet his favourite author herta mueller; a soldier's wife comes back from the brink; a businessman meets a muslim woman over a chair incident; paul, a rat-historian, traces his 'mischief's' origins back to kafka's josephine the mouse singer. whether a soldier's wife, someone observing life from her veranda in an everyday suburban neighbourhood, or a murder of crows regretting their lost chance at ruling the world, in this collection lies a multivariate of human, and other, experiences and voices that stretch across the borderlines of here and there, of what sounds impossible, but implacably located in the now of everyday life. this is a bunch of stories inhabited by real people/ beings who are all, in their own ways, undergoing a quest - whether running to or from love, from themselves and others or running towards better versions of themselves. they inhabit the world of literature and art, prisons, hospitals, war or back water towns. they are a multiplicity of wounds and celebrations where some of these stories are too big for more than one page or too many to be contained in one book. the author, as both narrator and voyeur, travels a tightrope strung between sadness and hopefulness. many of these stories have been published and several have received awards, including the soldier's wife which won the tod hunter short story prize.