The Brothers Grimm take lessons in fiction from Angela Carter to produce this uncanny and surreal work. Judy Budnitz might just be the most exciting and unusual literary figure to emerge from the US literary thicket in 2000. She marries great technical skill to quirky humour and dizzying metaphor. She has an uncanny knack for the destabilizing and indelible image, but does not abandon sense for sensibility. She is always readable, albeit strangely so. She might yet be an Americanized heir to the throne left vacant by Angela Carter. This collection of stories is strikingly surreal and hugely entertaining. It will appeal to fans of everyone from Tibor Fischer via Lorrie Moore to Nicholson Baker, or put another way, from Heathers to Edward Scissorhands via Annie Hall. Among the storylines: a young man is persuaded to donate his heart to his dying mother; a girl comes of age in strange suburbia, her only friend a man dressed in a dogsuit; a man and a woman conduct a passionate love affair on a park bench.

The astonishing Orange Prize-shortlisted debut from the author of 'Flying Leap' and 'Nice Big American Baby'. This is a truly strange and striking tale that begins in the deep, and deeply magical, European forest, in the world depicted in Chagall's paintings and Grimms' Fairy Tales, and proceeds to tell the story of four generations of women from one fated family. Budnitz builds her book with wit and art somewhere in the gaps between magic realism, family saga and female bildungsroman. She marries great technical skill to quirky humour and dizzying metaphor. She has an uncanny knack for the destabilizing and indelible image, but does not abandon sense for sensibility. She is always readable, albeit strangely so. She might yet be an Americanized heir to the throne left vacant by Angela Carter.

'Unforgettable and utterly affecting. You can't turn the pages fast enough' Dave Eggers Judy Budnitz, author of the Orange Prize shortlisted novel If I Told You Once and the critically acclaimed collection Flying Leap. creates her own brand of stark, dystopian reality in this impressive collection of blisteringly inventive and surreal new stories. Budnitz's first-person narrators are pitch perfect, helping the reader to see from their perspective, no matter how odd it might be. Clever, comic and perpetually surprising, these are stories that demand to be read again and again. 'A truly talented young writer.' Times

In her utterly original novel about mothers, daughters, and love, Judy Budnitz gives the traditional folktale an electrifying twist as she follows four generations of women from an Eastern European village to the tenements of an American city. Elena, born into a family ruled by a formidable mother, embarks on an epic journey to the New World, met along the way by evil, magic, and good fortune. The daughter, grand-daughter, and great-granddaughter who follow each share her special powers of observation and, often, destruction. The result is a family saga unlike any other: a hilarious, heartbreaking story of family ties that bind.

These shocking, brilliant, and ultimately beautiful stories chronicle the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Each tale is laced with enough wit, humor, and imagination to keep the reader constantly amazed. From the young son persuaded to donate his heart to his dying mother, to the girl who befriends a man in a dog suit in post-apocolyptic suburbia, to the man and woman conducting a love affair across a park bench, these characters delight and dazzle.