Sarah Selecky's collection of short stories was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, Canada's top literary prize. The image on the book cover is of a broken plate: a particularly apt image for a collection in which characters are invariably fragile and the stories document the period before, during, or after their breakage. They are on the whole unlikable, selfish, bulldozing ahead through their self-absorption, and their stories are inevitably gloomy.

In "Throwing Cotton" a woman longing for a child, womb "officially prepared", sleeps then not with her husband but with a house guest. She admires a woman who "doesn't even pretend to care about anything other than herself," whose art project is made of pubic hairs. In "Watching Atlas", a story of child abandonment, hope for the future is seen in "maybe we will all remember this day as though it was the beginning of everything rather than the end," but that plaintive maybe is unlikely. For these relationships it is, almost certainly, the end.

A wish for second chances is a refrain, but the harsh reality is that second chances are only a dream. The narrator of "Go-Manchura" tries to sell supposedly restorative, natural, organic products to her friends but they immediately see through the deception, seeing it for a "creepy…pyramid scheme that uses mushrooms for world domination." Time and time again we see characters lacking in self-knowledge.

In "This Is How We Grow As Humans", a highly ironic title, Richard shows the self-knowledge, or perhaps universal knowledge, of "I'm a man… Men don't soften things." The story deals with becoming a "more evolved person" and growth is equated with facing our fears. Yet the protagonist fails to see either herself or her significant other as they really are. Growth, if any, is infinitesimal.

The most satisfying story is "Paul Farenbacher's Yard Sale", whose narrator seems another victim of broken dreams and unfulfilled expectations, selling cleaning products out of her parents' basement. She says "ten years ago, if someone had told me this would be my life, I would never have believed it." But by the end of this story Meredith has an epiphany. She recognizes the centrality of the relationship she had with the deceased Paul Farenbacher and her own need to celebrate and treasure it. "Something," she says, "wavers in my solar plexus," and that recognition transforms her.

In an interview Selecky says, "I'm trying to acknowledge darkness and lightness," and claims that any reader who sees too much of one or the other is missing the point. Her sense of the ridiculous does bring humor into what seems a predominantly dark palette. The stories are crisply told, shining a torch of insight into the reality of broken lives. Many rewards await the reader of these stories.