An elderly woman yearns for the love of a man she’s only watched from across their courtyard. A boy struggles for the approval of a father whose values he can never share. An expat in Beijing deals with the repercussions of his lifestyle of excess. And an old man struggles to separate who he once was from who he has become. From the opening lines of the first story in which a young bride looks to Ann Landers for advice regarding her husband’s bizarre sexual requests, readers enter a world of the marginalised and the hapless. In this collection of stories, six of which have appeared in North American literary journals, Sparling’s storytelling is at once sympathetic and merciless. Stripping the veneer from the privileged and the deprived, the young and the old, his stories reveal the desperation with which they pursue dreams both worthwhile and vain.