The stories in this collection expose the hidden desires and fears of the characters, exposing their self-delusions, images of themselves and their habits. There are bankers, furniture dealers, a self-employed forester, a former-hippie divorcée, an astronomer coping with academic redundancy, an assistant in a jewellery store, a womanising Scottish photographer, and a surgeon who bullies his younger son. These characters have briefly sketched pasts and family ties, memories of exile in Tomsk or long-gone friendships. They appear in upstate New York and Manhattan, the Sussex countryside and suburban north London, and among the mountains of Albania and France.