A woman sleeps rough on the step of a bank, eating soap to keep herself clean inside while the flowers on her blanket talk to each other; two children at a wake discover friendship over forbidden food; a husband and wife eat fish and chips in their car with the windscreen wipers on high speed just for the fun of it. Carrying the reader from the landscape of the author's native Scotland to the rivers and woodlands of England, these twenty-four stories are tales of unremarkable lives and loves, remarkably told.