Donna, with her flamboyant hair and intricate tattoos, likes to hide behind an upfront attitude. Her work as a prison drugs adviser means mixing with officers and inmates, and trying to make sense of how swiftly lives can be destroyed and how difficult they can be to rebuild. And then her joy when she strikes up with Shane - lovers' days out by the sea at Whitby - is clouded by his lawless past and her deepening anguish over a friend's death. She clashes with her mother Maggie, a hard-pressed teacher, and her brother Lee, a grouchy teenage DJ, but bonds with grandmother Ruby in her tower-block home. As Ruby shares reminiscences of wartime romances and goes dancing in her charity-shop silver shoes she offers a lesson in passion and survival. Roddy Doyle praised Daphne Glazer's first collection as: 'great stories, shocking and ordinary', and the author says of her fiction: 'Everything I write is about those quirky, unlikely people you might meet in the street.'