"Spare, poised stories in a fashionably narrow range of the minor keys, with carefully plucked chords of foreboding and loss strumming just under the surface." --Kirkus Reviews Peter Cameron's first collection of short stories, published while he was in his mid-twenties, marks the auspicious  debut of a rare talent. Here characters act on lies they spin to protect themselves,  or to protect others. In "What Do People Do All Day?", a child gamely stalls a father's confession of adultery. The heroine of "Fast Forward" tells her dying mother that she's engaged--a lie designed to give the old woman a final few days of happiness. And in "Memorial Day," a teenage boy struggles to adjust to his mother's new husband, a stepfather only thirteen years his senior.