We Are Not the Same Anymore

Book excerpt: "We are Not the Same Anymore" is a collection of short fiction about people trying to connect with each other and the difficulties of finding intimacy. These stories play out the small catastrophes of everyday life. A man turns up at his daughter's birthday party with a goldfish in an ice-cream container. On the way to collect firewood, a woman and her teenaged neighbor crash in a snowstorm. An unwilling son helps his sister and father put up posters for a missing dog named Michael. Familiar and endearing, Chris Somerville's characters are consumed with their own neuroses, and through their eyes, the landscape of the domestic becomes surreal and dully terrifying. Suffused with a dark humor, their struggles for intimacy are recreated on the page with a deft and affectionate touch.""