A small boy and his grandmother set sail for China in the mud of her back yard a supermarket car park becomes a graveyard of strewn blueberries migratory birds fly over a marshland ringing with the sound of wooden spoons on kitchen pots and the breaking of a silence between two roommates leads to disquieting revelations. Eliza Robertson's delicate and startling stories tell of the adventure of the ordinary and the magic within the everyday. Here there are swindlers and innocents, unlikely heroes and gritty survivors they teach us how to trap hummingbirds, relinquish dreams gracefully and feed raccoons without getting bitten. From windswept Pacific beaches to cafés in the heart of Lisbon, and from the depths of puddles on mountain running paths to the heights of extrasolar plant 51 Osiris C, these are tales of wildness and wonder, of animals in search of an escape and outsiders looking for a way back in.

From the winner of the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize comes a delicate and startling collection about the adventure within the ordinary and the magic within everyday life