“Every successful marriage has its own private language.” So it is for baby boomer Kate and her beloved architect husband, Jack, 30 years into their seemingly idyllic metropolitan North London life. And so it is for spiky millennial screenwriter Phoebe and her charming loafer of a partner, Tony. But when Phoebe’s steamy television series, “Cheating,” becomes the year’s most talked-about show, Kate thinks she sees in it details and intimacies of her marriage that only she and her husband could possibly have known. Who has betrayed whom? Who has stolen whose story --- and why?

In 2017, inspired in part by Henry James’ THE TURN OF THE SCREW, the acclaimed English novelist John Lanchester published a ghost story in The New Yorker. "Signal," an eerie story of contemporary life and the perils of technology, was a sensation among readers --- and since then Lanchester has written several more. REALITY AND OTHER STORIES gathers the best of these, taking readers to an uncanny world familiar to fans of “The Twilight Zone” or “Black Mirror.” Household gizmos with a mind of their own. Mysterious cell phone calls from unknown numbers. Reality TV shows and the creeping suspicion that none of this is real.

Ravaged by the Change, an island nation in a time very much like our own has built the Wall --- an enormous concrete barrier around its entire coastline. Joseph Kavanagh, a new Defender, has one task: to protect his section of the Wall from the Others, the desperate souls who are trapped amid the rising seas outside and are a constant threat. Failure will result in death or a fate perhaps worse: being put to sea and made an Other himself. Beset by cold, loneliness and fear, Kavanagh tries to fulfill his duties to his demanding Captain and Sergeant, even as he grows closer to his fellow Defenders. A dark part of him wonders if it would be interesting if something did happen, if they came, if he had to fight for his life.

In 2008, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are going under, and the residents of Pepys Road, London --- including a banker and his shopaholic wife, an old woman dying of a brain tumor and her graffiti-artist grandson, and a shadowy refugee who works as the meter maid --- are receiving anonymous postcards reading “We Want What You Have.” Who is behind it? What do they want?