This brand new edition of short stories comprises the best of James Robertson's work, collected together here for the first time. They range in setting from a dysfunctional safari park to a dentist's surgery, from the poverty of hope of a reservation in South Dakota to the nightmare vision of a future Scotland riven by ethnic cleansing, from friendships strong in adversity to marriages heading for the rocks. Nothing is quite what it seems in these stories. Running through them is an undercurrent of optimism tinged with despair, as the personal meets the political and individual men and women make choices that will change their lives forever. Surreal, realistic, angry, philosophical, funny and humane, Robertson's shorter fiction explores the lives of his characters with the same deftness of touch that has brought critical acclaim for novels such as And the Land Lay Still and The Testament of Gideon Mack.