Chemistry and Other Stories

'As good as any modern fiction you will read this year' Sunday Times, Best new short story collectionsA wife compulsively digs in her garden. Two brothers, long estranged, reunite for a terse, heady summer. A woman flies to Krakow to see her adult son.

At dusk, a teenage girl pushes her dying mother out into the sea. A small boy sits on his own in the cinema, entranced by the cowboys who light up the screen. With these short stories, Tim Pears illuminates a series of blazing moments in quiet lives - the tragic, strange, funny and beautiful fragments that make and unmake us - and shines a light into the gulfs that lie between us and those who should know us best.