"Funny and serious, with a subtle power that accumulates like a shoplifter adding coat upon coat."—Mark Anthony Jarman

A couple adopt a difficult dog and argue over morality. A man abandons his family in the middle of the night and spontaneously takes a flight across the country. A woman is rushed into emergency brain surgery at Christmas time.

What Endures represents Pauline Holdstock’s responses to a world evolving at terrifying speed, exposing the absurd, the ridiculous, and the downright disturbing. Ranging from the eerily speculative to the flat-out comic, Holdstock’s stories attempt to discover what it is that saves us, time and again, from despair at ourselves and our world.