In his debut collection of award-winning stories, Nick Mulgrew tells fourteen subtly interlinked tales set along the Southern African coastline from Cape Town to Mozambique, in which relationships, dreams and even narrators die: where fields catch fire, towers implode, and the shadows of the past grow long. But even from the most uneasy corners - tourist traps, colonial purgatories and libraries for the blind - these stories offer small mercies: glimpses of faith, beauty, and the possibility of salvation, no matter how slight.