A man carries his girlfriend in the left-hand breast pocket of his shirt. During World War II, a young soldier searches the houses and barns of the families with whom he grew up. An astronaut wonders whether she can adapt to life back on earth.

In her second collection of short fiction, 100neHundred, Laura Besley explores a kaleidoscope of emotions through 100 stories of exactly 100 words.

In these one-hundred stories – each one-hundred words long – Besley captures her characters’ universes in vivid detail, their predicaments unspooling and oozing off the page. Besley guides us through these worlds filled with relationships that flounder and flourish, mysterious moments of surrealism, and hard realities of contemporary life. Brimming with tenderness and triumph, heartbreak and wonderment, 100neHundred is a masterful collection of micro stories that read macro.

Santino Prinzi, Co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day in the UK Consulting Editor at New Flash Fiction Review