This stunningly intimate collection of stories is an exquisite portrait of a Jewish community — the secular and religious families who inhabit it and the tensions that exist there — that illuminates the unexpected ways we remain connected during times of change.

When Uncle Isaac moves back from L.A. to help his sister, Elaine Levine, care for her suddenly motherless grandchildren, he finds himself embroiled in even more drama than he would like in their suburban neighbourhood. Meanwhile, a nanny miles from her own family in the Philippines, cares for a young boy who doesn’t fit in at school. A woman in mid-life contends with the task of cleaning out the house in which she grew up, while her teenage son struggles with why his dad moved out. And down the street, a mother and her two daughters prepare for a wedding and transitions they didn’t see coming.

Spanning fifteen years in the lives of a multi-generational family and their neighbours, this remarkable collection is an intimate portrait of a suburban Jewish community by a writer with a keen eye for detail, a gentle sense of humour, and an immense literary talent.

Sidura Ludwig's profile page

• Short-listed, Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature: Fiction

All readers can enjoy Ludwig’s writing. She shows great empathy for her characters, even when they behave badly.

Library Journal

This volume can claim kinship with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are?, and Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House, works in which interconnected stories provide a vessel for examining the human comedy in its often-troubling complexity … Ludwig doesn’t sentimentalize … and she has an eye for the absurdities of human behaviour in even the most poignant of circumstances. But there’s compassion in her intimate examination of these lives.

Vancouver Sun