Michelle Berry has one of the most darkly playful and unique voices in Canadian literature and her second collection of short stories, Margaret Lives in the Basement is no exception. At its heart are characters full of longing, trapped by circumstance and unable to reach out or connect with one another. Whether it’s Margaret in the basement and her neighbours above, or two couples working out their family melodramas over dinner, there is always the presence of others but rarely a connection between them. By twists and turns Berry subverts what we know to be normal and arrives at something, though strange, more real than we like to admit.