This powerful collection of stores, set in the mid-west among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time, was the first by Raymond Carver to be published in the UK. With its spare, colloquial narration and razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate, the collection was to become one of the most influential literary works of the 1980s.
These brilliant shards - some no more than three or four pages long - confirm Carver's place in the hall of America's great writers and suggest that, with his hero Chekhov, he was one of the world's masters of the short story . . ."
