A woman pursues a man who cut ahead of her in a line. Two nice people report that a child is being left unsupervised at a local beach. Chance meetings, spontaneous trips away, and the thrill of the new: the anticipation and the ardour, the disappointment and casual disregard. Romances, old and new, shift and sour.

Maggie Armstrong's debut is a collection of alternative romances told from a netherworld of love and disenchantment. These stories, at once familiar and strange, follow the interior biography of an indistinct Dublin woman, from early adulthood into motherhood and the trials of young family life right up to the pandemic. Slippery, flawed and acute, Maggie Armstrong's narrator navigates a world of awkward expectation and latent hostility.