Daring, tough, and darkly humorous, these linked stories have at their centre the relationship between parents and children. As devastating in their emotional honesty as they are poignant and wise, these stories map the intricate terrain of adoption and birth, and look at the lives we make for ourselves in the universal search for who we are. Among them: a girl is abducted by a man claiming to be her father; a distraught mother finds herself fabricating a past for her adopted teenaged daughter; a woman is haunted by her birth mother’s ghostly visitations; a new mother is overtaken by a feeling of alienation as gradually her world becomes as empty as she feels her heart to be.