Clive Sinclair's first collection of stories won the Somerset Maugham Award. His second was short-listed for the inaugural Dylan Thomas Award. His third won both the PEN Silver Pen, and the Jewish Quarterly Award for fiction. This is his fourth. The new stories range from New Orleans and Texas to Peru and Venice. Their subjects are loss, the fear of loss, and love, most especially that between husbands and wives, fathers and sons. Their cast includes the quick and the dead, the real and the imagined: Davy Crockett, Kinky Friedman, Captain Haddock, Princess Diana, and Shylock. They are as cruel as life, and as funny.

Tales of America, adultery, football, incest, love, paranoia, sadism and Zionism.... Wickedly funny these stories may be, but heartless they are not. Disturbing images abound; like the loving family that feasts upon living butterflies; and other images that connect the themes with places deeper than the mind. The narrators are an extraordinary a berserk psychiatrist, a giraffe, a man with an invisible creature on his back, a Jewish private eye, a communist with a bowel fixation, and various other disillusioned souls. None the less, each story is lucid, concisely written and has a strong sense of location. In The Promised Land a diaspora Jew travels to Israel determined to plant his seed, only to find himself excluded from his erotic paradise. In Le Docteur Enchaîné, a London psychiatrist decides that he can only find satisfaction with a dumb woman and takes the remedy into his own hands. In The Luftmensh, Joshua Smolinsky, trailing a missing writer to New Orleans, becomes involved with ghosts from American and Jewish history. In A Moment of Happiness a Czech hypochondriac manipulates two tourists into providing him with ‘that single 1/60th of a second when I am not afraid’....