The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

If your jaw dropped when you read Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, it will drop again when you pick up this exemplary collection, whose stories of uncommon situations clarify that each of us is eventually put on the edge. The meticulously described collapse of a pier in a faded coastal town, one woman's moral choice while trapped at a seemingly abandoned space station on Mars, an adventurer's final letter as he lies dying in the jungle—all show how, as much as we'd like to sink into the predictable, we face jolts and forking roads that bring out our best or worst, often revealing, as one narrator says, "those disabilities which become skills in the right context." Even a more routine episode, such as a prodigal daughter's sudden, desperate effort to help the mother she's discovered living in filth, yields an eerie understanding of how we can go off the tracks. The author's portrait of a stranger's intervention during a recognizably uncomfortable Christmas dinner is a masterpiece of family friction and one character's easy fall from top dog to barrel's bottom.