Meet an outsider who builds a gingerbread house at the edge of an English village. Meet the bereaved mother who borrows her next door neighbour's baby. Meet the woman who is seduced into buying special-offer babies at the supermarket and the father who is reminded of his son as he watches the rescue of a group of Chilean miners.
With psychological insight and a lightness of touch frequently found in fairy tales, Carys Bray delves under the surface of ordinary lives to explore loss, disappointment, frustrated expectations and regret.
Shades of Angela Carter... that deceptively light touch delivers swift, hard punches to the solar plexus. - The Guardian
Suburbia in all its tarnished glory - Carys Bray teases at the cracks, and pulls at all the loose threads dangling, in short stories that are funny and sad and achingly true. - Robert Shearman
Carys Bray lays to rest the myth that fiction which examines the domestic sphere is familiar and unchallenging... Bray's stories are never afraid to expose the darkness that exists behind suburban front doors, but at their heart are brave, moving evocations of what it means to be at home with those you love. - Jenn Ashworth