by Tobias Wolff
First published 1999
These stories unfold in kitchens, bedrooms, and backyards where ordinary people face moments that crack their worlds open. Wolff places his characters in familiar territory before revealing the strange currents running beneath surface calm. A family dinner turns into something unrecognizable. A routine conversation exposes buried secrets. Each story builds from recognizable domestic scenes toward events that feel both shocking and inevitable. The protagonists navigate marriages, friendships, and family relationships that suddenly demand choices they never expected to make. Wolff transforms living rooms and suburban streets into places where the extraordinary emerges from what seemed predictable. These characters discover that their ordinary lives contain depths of feeling and possibility they had not imagined.
Genres: domestic-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: ordinary-extraordinary, slice-of-life
101 pages · Hardcover · HarperCollins