From the corner of a darkened room Joy Stone watches herself. As memories of the deaths of her lover and mother surface unbidden, life for Joy narrows to negotiating each day, each encounter, each second; to finding the trick to keep living. Told with shattering clarity and wry wit, this is a Scottish classic fit for our time.

Janice Galloway's first novel,The Trick is to Keep Breathing,now widely regarded as a Scottish contemporary classic, was published in 1990 and won the MIND/Allen Lane Book of the Year. Her second novel,Foreign Parts,won the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award while her third,Clara, about the tempestuous life of nineteenth-century pianist Clara Wieck Schumann, won the Saltire Award in 2002. Collaborative texts include an opera with Sally Beamish and three cross-discipline works with Anne Bevan, the Orcadian sculptor. Her 'anti-memoir',This Is Not About Me, was published by Granta in September 2008 to universal critical acclaim. She lives in Lanarkshire.

Galloway invites us into the mind of a woman on the edge, in a novel which "resembles Tristram Shandy as rewritten by Sylvia Plath." New York Times