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Winner of the 2015 International Frank OConnor Short Story AwardWinner of the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered PrizeShortlisted for the 2015 Wales Book of the Year: FictionShortlisted for the 2015 Edge Hill Short Story PrizeThe Globe 100: The Best International Fiction of 2017In a remote Australian settlement a young wife with an untellable secret reluctantly invites her neighbour into her home. A Quaker spinster offers companionship to a condemned man in a Colorado jail. In the ice and snows of Siberia an office employee from Birmingham witnesses a scene that will change her life. At a jubilee celebration in a northern English town a middle-aged alderman opens his heart to Queen Victoria. A teenage daughter leaves home in search of adventure. High in the Cumbrian fells a woman seeks help from her fathers enemy.Spare, precise, charged with a prickly wit, the stories in Carys Davies’s sparkling second collection remind us how little we know of the lives of others.