Margot Gritt's debut collection includes short stories and novellas that, at first glance, are not united by a common theme, but they read surprisingly seamlessly. Gritt's characters painfully experience a collision with reality, and therefore often seek solace in fantasy. Stories about fragile people whose world collapsed surprisingly accurately convey the picture of the modern generation’s perception of reality. This is a book about the intrusion into the human life of other people or certain events and the consequences to which these intrusions lead. “Hands crossed at the wrists, right over left, like that saint on the faded cardboard icon that mommy carries in her wallet. Thumbs, like lovers, reach out to each other and interlock. The polish on one nail is peeling—this week it's the color of an unripe gooseberry—but in a moment it won't matter: her fingers will no longer be fingers and her hands will no longer be hands when she opens her palms and raises them higher. A dark bird will flutter onto the wall, which seems to have been doused with sunlight from a bucket.” “The mouse was born deaf and dumb, but for the first months she cried loudly, like other babies, so no one noticed. She didn’t cry, she howled. Lara locked herself in the bathroom so as not to hear her howling, turned two taps simultaneously until they stopped, and then sat for a long time in the cold water. After giving birth, the body did not shrink, it seemed to be blurring, coming apart at the seams, along burgundy stretch marks, spreading under her fingers, trying to take up the entire volume of the bath.”