'This debut collection, human and humorous, is an impressive display ...Bloom is uncensorious, revelling in the predicaments she has created for her protagonists and their instinct for survival ...She has great flexibility of narrative voice, whether as a middle-aged furrier in love with a schoolgirl or a young boy who accidentally shoots his cousin with his father's gun' The Times 'Bereavement, moral breakdown and sexual non-conformity are the deep waters into which Amy Bloom plunges in her first book -- though causing scarcely a ripple in the smooth narrative surface ...Bloom's advice seems to be: whatever it takes to scrape through life, do it -- grand gesture or compromise, sex or shopping' Independent on Sunday 'Amy Bloom's debut collection is a book which beckons if it is put down unfinished, and which -- although contemporary -- provides all the engrossing satisfaction of a nineteenth-century novel' Guardian 'An impressive addition to the booming renaissance in the American short story. Bloom has all the elegant acuity of a modern day Flannery O'Connor ...Her style is astonishingly versatile: wry and acerbic one minute; generous and passionate the next' GQ 'This is truly a collection that leaves the reader in a state of grace' Sunday Times