A small-town Bill Clinton look-alike agonizes over whether to accept a tempting offer from the CIA; an obese young woman finds love in a prairie cafe; a lonely child encounters a supernatural being; a teenage girl struggles with a sexual predator as she hitchhikes on the autobahn; a newly divorced man tries to return his adopted children; two brothers and a sister take their father’s ashes back to the North, trying to make it over the ice road before break-up. These are just a few of the stories from Margaret Macpherson’s remarkable debut collection, Perilous Departures. Perilous though they may be, all of these stories represent a departure from the ordinary and all celebrate the chaotic splendour of life. Each story, in its individuality, illuminates the path that leads to home, but home isn’t always what we expect, and paths in Macpherson’s world are rarely straight and narrow.