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No wonder this book was nominated for a Giller Prize, even if it was the dark horse. These ten short stories are deliriously rich, visceral and sexy. Tenuously balanced on spare dialogue and packed with startling, sensuous images, they're also dreamy, if mercifully free of the sentimentality, implausibility and self-consciousness of so-called poetic fiction. Unfortunately, Moore's sentences are relentlessly short and though they're always rewarding, I came to feel riddled. These are stories of omen entering mid-life, poised between the past that made them, and the future they may foresee, if not oversee. They contemplate friendship, motherhood, sex, loneliness within marriage and, with brave anxiety, sexual infidelity. Moore indulgently recreates the intense friendships and general urgency — with the catalysts of booze and pot — of a 1980s early adulthood. In one story where an abortion forges enduring loyalty between two girlfriends, the narrator remembers: "That year I live on submarine sandwiches micro-waved in plastic wrap. When I peel back the wrap, the submarine hangs out soggy and spent, like a tongue after a strangling." Moore never sums up meaning, instead letting contradiction, coincidence and imagery do the work; in the end, the book floats on ambiguity, open. One of many hot sex scenes has a couple banging against a fridge, an automatic icemaker adding to the fun. In "Close Your Eyes," a woman remembers reading Marguerite Duras with a friend, "during a snowstorm, taking turns reading aloud while the headlights of fishtailing cars swept the ceiling and the velvet funk of pea soup rose from the stove. We ere overjoyed for Marguerite Duras. 'Way to go Marguerite,' we yelled." Three years later, re-reading the book, the woman is shocked to find it different. "The young lover …seems to be terrorizing the novelist, who is too old and proud and drunk to do anything about it …. How had we mistaken this for hope?" Though by the end of the collection I was eager for a long, breathing sentence that would say something big-about kindness, identity, art — I was invigorated, as if intoxicated, by the tactility and essentiality of all the surfaces of my life.