'As deviously weighty as a good pop song.' - Anson Cameron, author of Stealing Picasso, Nice Shootin', Cowboy and Silences Long Gone. In these sixteen tales, Robert Power captures the joys and frailties of seemingly ordinary lives with extraordinary perception and wit. The stories take us from a Manhattan diner to a train station in Vietnam, from the Wild West to small town Australia, in a dazzling display of faith in language and in life. A man staying in New York pretends to be blind and inveigles his way through the defences of a lonely diner waitress; a child beggar in Vietnam makes his determined way through loss and into the world; a father falls prey to the temptations of the internet; a client discovers his psychiatrist's startling secret; and a wife sends a beautiful, but shocking, letter to her husband, the postman. Each delicious story transports the reader into another world and life with authorial grace and an assured lightness of touch.