There are many more stories with characters and situations that struck me and haunted me long after I read their last lines. To preface, this was chosen as a book club book and isn't something I would choose to read myself, as I've ever really gelled with short stories. You can read most short stories without thinking about who wrote them, and usually if they're good they're distinct from the other short stories standing around them.

July's quicksilver fiction is always surprising, and it takes pains to remind us that, somehow, we all belong somewhere. I realise that this short review has not really articulated what made me uneasy - Robin's review here explains it much better. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

July’s characters are managing, barely, to pull themselves from the brink of their ordinary lives, telling themselves constantly that they could’ve done better, but settling for this in the meantime – even if ‘this’ is, simply, as good as it’s gonna get. Another woman is disappointed to realize that the people she thought were her ‘starter friends’ are, in fact, her only friends.

July’s milieux are the nondescript workplaces, mediocre apartments, shallow friendships and provisional families of America’s 20- and 30-somethings.This is where July’s stories take a darker turn, where girlish or adolescent fantasies veer toward the perverse. While I can't deny that I liked some of these stories more than others, I can attest that every entry in this award-winning collection is of the same level of quality work. Loneliness, insecurity and ineptitude are the prominent features of adulthood here, and (healing or edifying or relief-giving) encounters that allow the narrators to offer care or fellowship to a child emphasise a contrast with their interactions with 'normal' people who treat them with varying degrees of disdain and disinterest. In 1974 they founded North Atlantic Books, a publisher of alternative health, martial arts, and spiritual titles.