In this absorbing first book of stories, Salahdin Imam displays a profound imagination, one schooled by a life that has taken him across the globe, from elite educational institutions to battlefields to the world’s powerful banks. His stories effortlessly inhabit the lives and probe the secret motivations of men and women of all classes and backgrounds, characters placed by fate in difficult, and often dangerous situations. With clear-sighted compassion his wonderfully varied hard-hitting stories explore the vagaries of the human heart, how unexpected its turns, how inconsistent its reasoning, how self-contradictory and cruel it is sometimes, and how capable of strengthening itself and triumphing despite everything.