Angela Pendergast, escapee from the Australian bush, grew up with the smell of hot mutton fat in her hair, the thought of her teeth crunching a cold Tim Tam chocolate biscuit-the height of decadent frivolity. Now, though her tastes have grown and she knows absolutely what she wants, her life is embarrassingly stuck. So when the Devil drops into her bedroom in her sharehouse in inner-city Sydney with a contract in hand, she signs. He's got only a Hell's week to fulfil his side, but in the meantime he must chaperone her-or is it the other way around?**

Temptation, indulgence, exploration and shortcuts. Love and compulsion. An ocean in Kansas, the Magic Lino, the real story behind the one told by Robert Louis Stevenson, a chef dying of ennui, gathering bluebirds, paying with candywrap. And the greatest story ever told--by Asher E. Treat, of course. The glorious chaos of singing, prancing, perfumed and stinking, the dead and the busy, tragic and achingly otherwise--life itself.**

A powerfully evocative portrait of an alternative community in the early 1970s, told with a child's-eye simplicity by a young resident. Short fiction from an author whose work has been described by World Fantasy Award-winner Jeff VanderMeer as Rapacious, intelligent and witty.