The High Places: Stories (Paperback)

From the author of The Night Guest comes a collection of fourteen scintillating short stories: surprising, wise, thought-provoking and superbly wrought.

The wife was driving on the night they hit Mr Ronald.
‘My first drive since getting married,’ she said.

‘First this, first that,’ said her husband. He looked at her, sitting high in the seat: her hair looked flimsy and blonde. It was ten o’clock and only just dark. These were the days for marrying – the long days, and the summer. It hadn’t rained.

Ranging in setting from Australia to Greece, England to a Pacific island, these stories focus on people: their hopes, fears, dreams and disappointments, and their relationships - between ill-matched friends, daughters and mothers, fathers and sons, married couples and sisters.

Some are eccentric, like the widower who believes his dead wife's mechanical parrot speaks to him, or the research scientist convinced that Charles Darwin visits him on his remote island; others delude themselves, like the mistress of a married man who thinks she's freer than her married sister.

All are confronted with events that make them see themselves and their lives from a fresh perspective. It is what they do as a result that is as unpredictable as life itself.

• Publisher: Picador USA
• ISBN: 9781250131850
• Pages: 288
• Weight: 0.272