On a crackling summer afternoon, four women – Gaunt, Bubbly, Obnoxious and Madam White – meet at a bar, and tell each other stories. Whisky, raspberry wine, absinthe and palm toddy flow; it’s Happy Hour, after all.
A contest unfolds. Whoever wears the talking hat gets a free drink. Whoever misses a turn buys the next round. Those are the rules.
And so begins a cycle of tales. A young woman troubled by a pet fish’s loneliness discovers love in her last term in college. A twelve-year-old receives a card on her birthday from a dead cousin. A sightless courtesan regains her vision, wooed by the sun. A woman encounters her late father in a dog on the street, and the world’s oldest invention consorts with its final one. One last story, told by the bartender, ends with a riddle.
The eighteen stories in this genre-confounding book trip at will from fantasy to science fiction, from magic realism to feminist parable, from ghost story to folk tale, rendering the bizarre everyday and the forbidden deeply human.
