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(Anyone else have those little houses as a kid?)
There's two novellas here, bookending a collection of short stories, a couple of which surprised me by being a tad woman's magazine-ish. Let's face it, I don't suppose anyone goes to Lionel Shriver for feel-goods and uplift. None of her characters is revealed by her critical eye to be a shining paragon of humanity: everyone's a bit crap, really. Sharp, incisive, just shy of merciless, it's good.