A dazzling collection of eleven interconnected stories from the bestselling, award-winning author of Shrines of Gaiety and Life After Life, with everything that readers love about her novels—the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations on human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop.

Nothing is quite as it seems in this collection of eleven dazzling stories. We meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a man who bets on a horse that may—or may not—have spoken to him.

A startling and funny feast for the imagination, these stories conjure a multiverse of subtly connected worlds while illuminating the webs of chance and connection among us all.

I think I realized the book was a collection of stories when I had to flip a few pages back and try to think what happened between the story of a queen craddling an egg after refusing to sacrifice her dog and then seeing the story of a woman watching herself being autopsied.

And then I kept reading and … well, I kinda liked some of the stories but the others were too whimsical for me.

The links between the stories were the tapestry in a room (toile du Jouy) which appears in a fortune teller’s room and also in the room of a mother. It’s depiction of kittens in a basket also resembles the heaven the secretary goes to:

The women all wore lovely dresses and had dainty feet in dainty shoes, and the men sported knee breeches and, quite often, tricorn hats. There were a lot of trees and many big urns full of flowers and some attractively ruined stone arches. (Mandy suspected they were follies rather than the remains of actual buildings, but same difference here.) A couple of little curly terriers romped around in the ruins and there were also some dignified hounds that were for hunting, but no one ever hunted, no one ever killed anything here. One of these dignified hounds had taken a fancy to Mandy and could always be found lying on the ground next to her, eternally raising its head to be stroked. There were—and this was particularly lovely—several very well-behaved little girls, who sat on the grass and played with baskets of kittens.

This is the life, she thought.

The story of the barren queen also fitted in not quite well (everything was a bit skewed in this book) and it took the reader away from the pastoral depictions all the way to fairytale mode.

There was once a Queen who ruled over a queendom that was between sunrise and sunset. The Queen’s heart was sore because she had no child. The cradle by her bed had lain empty many a long year. It was made of silver and studded with precious jewels. The little pillow was stuffed with swansdown, and it had taken a thousand silkworms a whole year to spin the silk for the mattress, yet no baby had ever lain within that cradle.

So I sat there thinking to myself. What the hell am I reading? It doesn’t make any sense. But then again, fairytales don’t really make sense when you have people jumping over mountains or defeating ogres with a single hit. I think I felt a bit cheated as there’s no indication this book is a collection of fairytales, more like fantasy creations that get weirder and weirder.

Topical and cleverly interwoven threads: working from home, a whale in the Thames, the Prince who was the “spare” and in love with an actress to name a few.

I don’t think I would recommend to others but it’s a good way to spend the afternoon.