Everyone has lost something: a loved one or love itself, innocence, youth, integrity, faith, self-respect.

This collection of short stories explores the many facets of loss, but all invite us to believe that loss can be met with wry humour or determination and, ultimately, accepted or overcome. They ask us what it means to be alive. The stories are variously funny, poignant, thoughtful, elegiac and darkly visceral. The collection includes What's in a Name? in which a schoolboy steals a hero's name and finds out that heroes have certain responsibilities. In Caught Knapping a plumber discovers a surprising connection with the Stone Age. In A Bobble Hat in Blue a pensioner takes up a risqué hobby, and in Like the Tide the wife of a disgraced politician gets revenge for an old betrayal.