'What marvellous fun, what pleasure to read Carlo's short stories! He employs a wonderfully unusual premise, each story is accessed through the world of an object and their intricate, inescapable entanglement with people's lives -- a wind-up cockroach that signals the end of a fling, a smartphone universe that traps its users in an idyllic country cottage, a single sheet stand that becomes a crutch, a missing umbrella that unleashes great evil, a gun that's hidden to be found, a stolen sweater that reveals family history, a mask that captures all the precarity of our pandemic lives. Here are stories that speak to the social biography of things, and open up for us world after world of drama, tension, urgency, making us rethink, reassess how we negotiate, in our daily lives, the things we own, and the things that own us.'
-- Janice Pariat