Violence and desire shatter the smooth surface of the everyday in this exceptional collection of short stories. A game between a woman's father and husband simmers and boils into scalding danger; a daughter creates an elaborate feast for her grieving mother; a solar eclipse burns the emotions and truths of a suppressed neighbourhood into the open. Foregrounding the voices and experiences of women and children and veering from claustrophobic, suffocating suburbia to untamed nature and its great vistas of desert and sky, hungry for what focuses on the terror of normality, prising back its veneer of respectability to reveal the hostility and menace that seethe beneath.