I've been a fan of Jane Rogers since her novel Mr. Wroe's Virgins was published in the US back in 2000 (I think) and subsequently chased down her three previous books, and have tried to stay reasonably current with what she has written since then. You might remember her as the author of the more recent The Testament of Jessie Lamb, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Arthur C. Clarke award. I saw this collection being offered by the UK's Comma Press—a press I have bought several collections from—I, of course, had to have it.

This is a delicious collection of twenty, previously published short stories. It is a broad collection, and as Hilary Mantel says, Rogers has the skill to "inhabit many different voices and different worlds....Her observation of our species is tender, precise, illuminating." The very first story in the collection, "Red Enters the Eye," is one of the best in the collection, a tale of a talented textile artist, who moves to Nigeria to make a difference at a woman's refuge. And the last story in the collection, "Hitting Trees with Sticks" is a story of dementia from the viewpoint of the victim. There's a ghost story, a story of Tesla, and the creepy "Ped-o-matique." There's a sort of African folk tale, and a tale of one young man through the viewpoint of several people connected in some way to him...and many more stories, different settings, different voices, all told by very human narrators.

*if my comments seem a bit flat, it's because I read this earlier in the year and am only now just commenting on it. ( )