Ali Smith is a writer, born in 1962 in Inverness, Scotland, to working-class parents. She was raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at Aberdeen, and then at Cambridge, for a Ph.D. that was never finished. In a 2004 interview with writing magazine Mslexia, she talked briefly about the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year and how it forced her to give up her job as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde to focus on what she really wanted to do: writing. Openly gay, she has been with her partner Sarah Wood for 17 years and dedicates all her books to her.

This collection of 12 intriguing short stories, by British novelist and Booker nominee Smith (Hotel World, 2001), is long on atmospherics and short on conventional plotting. In “The Child,” a woman goes grocery shopping, but her mundane chore turns surreal when she encounters an angelic-looking abandoned baby, whom she attempts to help. When the child begins spewing hateful misognynistic and racist jokes, the woman decides that reabandonment is the best way to go. In “I Know Something You Don’t Know,” a mother distraught over her son’s deadly illness calls up two alternative healers she finds in the Yellow Pages. One robs her blind, while the other makes only a feeble attempt to read the boy’s fortune. If Smith excels at creating, both in her stories and in her readers, a sense of eerie dislocation, she can also stir up an enchanting sense of whimsy, as in “The Third Person,” which posits a dozen beguiling scenarios for the future of a relationship, noting the “endlesss music that’s there between people, waiting to be played.” --Joanne Wilkinson