A.L. Kennedy’s fifth collection of short stories show us exactly what becomes of the broken-hearted. Her characters are perfectly ordinary people – whose marriages founder; who sit on their own in a cinema watching a film with no soundtrack; who risk sex in a hotel with an anonymous stranger or who order a luxurious meal as their lives fall apart – but the stories she weaves around them are truly remarkable.

She reveals the sadness, violence, hurt and terror, but also the redemption and the love – and she does so with enormous human compassion and leaps of black humour.

(Penguin Books)