` Kissing you is like new paint & old pain. It is like coffee & car alarms & a dim stairway & a stain & it`s like smoke.` (` Placing a Call`) How does love change us? & how do we change ourselves for love
- or for lack of it? Ten stories by acclaimed author Deborah Levy explore these delicate, impossible questions. In Vienna, an icy woman seduces a broken man; in London gardens, birds sing in computer start-up sounds; in ad-l&, a sleek copywriter becomes a kind of shaman. These are twenty-first century lives dissected with razor-sharp humour & curiosity, stories about what it means to live & love, together & alone.