A feral boy is captured and ‘civilised’ in the Languedoc region. A young woman is hired to look after a cloned dog that cost its owners $250, 000. A widower in a self-satisfied suburb engulfs his loneliness in a sea of rats. A weary city GP is baffled by a Mexican boy, the son of a taco-seller, who can feel no pain. A junior film editor invents the death of his own daughter because he can’t face going in to work. A vindictive teenager with a gasoline fixation runs into trouble with his Japanese neighbour. Two washed-up crooners in 1950s New York get creative while recording a schmaltzy Christmas special. In this beguiling new collection of stories, T. C. Boyle, one of the world’s greatest storytellers, explores the improbable, the tragic, the allegorical and the altogether ordinary.