Prize-winning writer Sarah Laing has written a superb collection of stories that are beautifully written, vividly rendered and which stimulate and surprise. 'Imagine that you're a statistic,' says one of the characters in these quirky, haunting stories of people whose inner lives let them escape the boxes that others put them into. The single mum, the student working in the pie factory, the newborn baby, the dying woman, the Kiwi alone in New York and many others pass through these stories and in doing so let us enter their lives.