Changes

The more I am writing about it, the more turgid and complex it is sounding, but that simply isn't the reading experience. It's totally entertaining and enthralling. It's rather like listening to a favourite album of beautiful songs. There is a common theme here, but each story is, like a song, an end in itself. The fact that I could happily have read a full book on virtually every chapter is testament to this. Inevitably, it kind of goes with the territory with short stories though that they always leave you wanting more, but in a good way.

If episodic stories are not your thing, then this might leave you frustrated, but Egan displays a mastery of storytelling. There's plenty of gentle humour here too. In fact almost every page it seems had me at least smiling if not laughing. While the worlds of music publishing and publicity - which gets a very funny airing - are not the worlds in which most of us live, the characters and personalities are all flawed to a degree and so come over as very real.