"Stridsberg has perfected a kind of contemporary fairy tale with a bracing Scandinavian edge, here elegantly translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner" Christian House, Financial TimesA young woman becomes obsessed with her psychoanalyst''s daughter. A police officer''s mistress clandestinely cares for his dying wifeA boy goes missing from the Swedish town of Huskvarna after he was last seen walking with a wolf. From the inside of a dead whale''s belly, to an industrial town emptied out after its factory''s closure, to a Texan prison where a young man visits his sister''s murderer on death row, Stridsberg approaches both the strange and the mundane with a fairy-tale sensibility that lights our world anew.Time runs through this collection like water, variously ebbing, flowing and rippling beneath the shimmering surface of Stridsberg''s proseThese genre-spanning stories are held together by a sense of longing: for escape from the narrow margins of a prescribed life, for a past which promises a