In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories by the author of the much-acclaimed Trespasses, women's lives are etched by deprivation -- 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. 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.