In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories by the author of the much-acclaimed Trespasses, women's lives are etched by poverty--material, emotional, sexual--but also splashed by beauty, sometimes even joy, as they search for the good in the cards they've been dealt.

A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a derelict housing estate, with blood on her hands. An expectant mother's worst fears about her husband's entanglement with a teenage girl are confirmed. A sister is tormented by visions of the man her brother murdered during the Troubles. A woman struggles to forgive herself after an abortion threatens to destroy her marriage. Plumbing the depths of intimacy, violence, and redemption, these stories are "dazzling, heartbreaking . . . keen to share the lessons of a lifetime" (Guardian).