'Helen Garner needs no introduction. Likewise her stories in this collection emerge on the page without guide, without preface, with no prologue, no opening referential epigraph. Garner's table of contents, like a menu of courses, displays fourteen curated tales. Each story—depicting separate sets of lives, people, ranging literary points of view, and diverse dialects—may stand alone, and yet the collection's sequence makes a perfect complement. While no overt analysis need be made of the presented order, its unfolding progression satisfies by occasional return to familiar inflection, texture, flavor, pang.' (Introduction)
