An excitingly contemporary and innovative blend of a beautifully written novel with pictures by a critically acclaimed author.Rudy is a successful architect, but life is not as happy as it should be. His work leaves him artistically frustrated, his wife and two young daughters have moved out of the house he designed for them, and his pushy young associate is vying for design supremacy. When a Vespa accident puts him into hospital and forces him to recuperate at home, he looks in danger of losing everything, but it is then that his repressed artistic yearnings start to make their presence felt, not just in the glass creations he begins to craft, but also in his strange, vivid dreams.This is a terrific novel in its own right, but with Sarah Laing's superb ink-wash drawings, interspersing the text, it offers an additional and intriguingly innovative way to tell a story.

Prize-winning writer Sarah Laing has written a superb collection of stories that are beautifully written, vividly rendered and which stimulate and surprise.'Imagine that you're a statistic,' says one of the characters in these quirky, haunting stories of people whose inner lives let them escape the boxes that others put them into. The single mum, the student working in the pie factory, the newborn baby, the dying woman, the Kiwi alone in New York and many others pass through these stories and in doing so let us enter their lives.

Newly-weds in Tangier experience the bitter sweetness of new encounters in this evocative short story.As with the contrasting flavours of the 'garnet-coloured beads, packed in pith and membrane', Emily and Ari savour the surprises of the alleyways and locals. But can they trust the man who offers to be their guide? Can they believe his claims that he has a kebab stand near to where they come from? And what of his prediction that they will soon have a beautiful baby boy?

The first novel from one of New Zealand's prize-winning, emerging writersClassical is karaoke - just playing covers of dead people's music - or so Wellingtonian Rebecca concluded at her London conservatorium. She's sabotaged her scholarship there, but wants to keep playing the cello, like her grandmother, Klara. Now unmoored from her classical training, she's in New York City, where Klara grew up. As Rebecca investigates her Jewish-refugee heritage, she starts to compose her own songs, but has to contend with diabetes and other burning issues: is she with the right man, or should she swap stability for lust? And how much longer can she live with a neurotic, junk-scavenging flatmate, on the verge of murdering another zebra fish?