Church Parents

Sylvia lives in a flat on a council estate with her not-quite-husband Obe and their two young children. She dreams of buying a house on a leafy street like the one she grew up in. If she closes her eyes, she can see it all so clearly: the stripped floorboards, the wisteria growing around the door.... It's not ideal that she's about to be made redundant, or that Obe, a playworker, is never going to earn more than the minimum wage. As sleep deprivation sets in, and the RnB downstairs gets ever louder, Sylvia's life starts to unravel.

Frances Mathews doesn’t get out much since her husband died, but that doesn’t stop her from jump-starting a campaign to create a hedgehog highway in Hilltop Place—feeding stations, holes at the bottoms of gates and fences, and wild garden areas for hibernation. To Frances’s delight, her neighbours are on board. Mostly.

This “gorgeous, electric” collection of short stories is about the inner lives of young women during their transformative twenties, navigating relationships, nostalgia for the past, and the uncertainty of the future (Mary-Beth Hughes, author of The Ocean House). With this sharp and witty...