In her latest collection of stories, Janice Galloway turns her unflinching gaze on relationships: the struggle to love against the odds, the overpowering yearning to communicate, and the extraordinary epiphanies where the World falls away leaving only the lovers. Love is, of course, where you find it, and it is here in an evening walk across a London bridge, a chip-shop pizza, Derek's mouth, or ham sandwiches cut into hearts. A brilliant observer of human frailty and tenderness, Janice Galloway examines the moments where lives split like a stone, where people are healed or broken by a word or the touch of a hand. Savagely accurate, vivid and unsentimental, these are painstakingly crafted stories: engaging, caustic, funny and terrifyingly true.

Janice Galloway was born in Ayrshire. Her first novel,The Trick is to Keep Breathing, was published in 1990 and won the MIND/Allen Lane Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel and Scottish First Book. The stage version has been performed at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, the Harbourfront Festival, Toronto, and the Royal Court in London. her second book,Blood, a collection of stories, was published in 1992. A story from that collection won theCosmopolitan/Perrier Short Story Award. Her second novel,Foreign Parts, won the 1994 McVitie's Prize. In 1994 she also won the E.M. Forster Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Glasgow.