What is pleasure, and how do we know we are experiencing it? What is regret, and is its absence a good enough reason for avoiding commitment? Is our psychic progress from youth to age linear, or do we contain a range of multitudes throughout our lives?Anna Wood poses these and other questions in a debut short story collection which features women on thresholds: from Dante-esque dark woods and glossily appointed boardrooms to wild nights out that seem to mark the end of adolescence, and at places of rupture, change, and choice. Her characters are fluid and sinuous, moving with ease through the world, yet not quite of it: shapeshifters, doppelgangers; sometimes out of body but never out of mind. With wit and brio, she slides from sharply observed comic dialogue to surrealism on the turn of a dime. These are sparkling, vividly alive stories to bolster you on a dark night, more fortifying than a shot of whisky, to carry in your pocket to ward off your devils, to make you cavort and sing with pleasure and the triumph of the will. Anna Wood poses these and other questions in a debut short story collection which features women on thresholds: from Dante-esque dark woods and glossily appointed boardrooms to wild nights out that seem to mark the end of adolescence, and at places of rupture, change, and choice. Her characters are fluid and sinuous, moving with ease through the world, yet not quite of it: shapeshifters, doppelgangers; sometimes out of body but never out of mind. With wit and brio, she slides from sharply observed comic dialogue to surrealism on the turn of a dime. These are sparkling, vividly alive stories to bolster you on a dark night, more fortifying than a shot of whisky, to carry in your pocket to ward off your devils, to make you cavort and sing with pleasure and the triumph of the will.