First published 2013
A man recalls the four months in his twenties when he possessed stunning beauty without knowing it. He remembers this brief period only through evidence: men fixing his computer without charge, strangers paying his bus fare, fights breaking out over him in bars. He made no use of this gift before it vanished, leaving only photographs behind. In another story, a widower fills his grief-stricken evenings by escorting affluent divorced and widowed women to opera performances. These eleven tales capture characters looking back with bitter recognition at moments they failed to understand as they lived them. Greer moves between tones of tenderness and despair as his protagonists confront the gap between how they experienced their lives and what actually happened to them.
Genres: short-stories, literary-fiction, american-fiction, contemporary, adult-fiction, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
224 pages · Kindle Edition · Picador