Almost all of our stories follow the same basic pattern: beginning, middle, end: exposition, action, and climax. It’s a neat and tidy way of telling a story. But life’s not like that, is it? It doesn’t obey the rules. Life’s stories – like the stories told here in But, personal and impersonal, historical and contemporary – are punctuated by disruption, derailment, and digression. Stories where the good guys lose. Stories where the bad girls win. Stories that just stop in the middle. Stories that fizzle out or simply never get going. Stories that don’t make sense. Stories that start where they should end and end where they start. Stories that go round in a cyclical loop, forever. Unfinished stories. Unstarted stories. Stories that stutter and mumble, that cough and splutter. That’s what we have here in this book: real stories, that do all of the above. That’s why this book is called But. Because the but is there to disrupt the easy normality of the way we tell our stories. This book is a collection of stories about real lives, real people, and real life. Stuttering, wayward, disjointed, funny, ridiculous, and unplanned.