The mysteries of kinship (families born into and families made) take disconcerting and familiar shapes in these refreshingly frank short stories. A family is haunted by a beast that splatters fruit against its walls every night, another undergoes a near-collision with a bus on the way home from the beach. Mothers are cold, fathers are absent--we know these moments in the abstract, but Adaui makes each as uncanny as our own lives: close but not yet understood.

The weird, fetid, familiar discomfort of family is front and centre in these short stories of all the ways we remain a mystery to each other.