In each of these 12 stories, small events have huge consequences. Heloise’s father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her 40s, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other. Janie’s bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie’s own age, but everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend’s death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend’s wife. Cecilia, a teenager, wakes one morning in Florence on vacation with her parents and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.

1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability. Pretty, dutiful homemaker Phyllis is married to Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. Their children are Colette, a bookish teenager, and Hugh, the golden boy. But when the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit and kisses Phyllis, something in her catches fire. Newly awake to the world, Phyllis makes a choice that defies all expectations of her as a wife and a mother. Nothing in these ordinary lives is so ordinary after all, as the family’s upheaval mirrors the dramatic transformation of the society around them.

Alexandr, Christine, Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their 20s. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer’s evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: she is at the hospital. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness.

In these short stories from the award-winning author of THE PAST, it’s the ordinary things that turn out to be most extraordinary. Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, made strange by the darkness; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly. Each of these stories illuminate crucial moments of transition, often imperceptible to the protagonists.

Four middle-aged siblings meet in their grandparents’ home in the English town of Kington for a three-week holiday. They have convened to discuss whether or not to sell the house, but family tensions dominate conversations. The brother has brought his Argentinian third wife, whom the three sisters haven’t met. One sister brings an ex-boyfriend’s teenage son; another laments her unsatisfying love life. THE PAST is a quiet exploration of suppressed desire and internal struggles.

A British woman talks us through her life, stage by stage. This may sound ho-hum ordinary, but Stella's life events are transformed into extraordinarily gripping episodes, pulling readers right inside her existence where we experience her life's trajectory as if the pivotal events she undergoes were our own.