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Everybody has their secrets, and in Sophie Hannah's fantastic stories the curtains positively twitch with them. Who, for instance, is the hooded figure hiding in the bushes outside a young man's house? Why does the same stranger keep appearing in the background of a family's holiday photographs? What makes a woman stand mesmerised by two children in a school playground, children she's never met but whose names she knows well? And which secret results in a former literary festival director sorting soiled laundry in a shabby hotel? All will be revealed... but at a cost. As Sophie Hannah uncovers the dark obsessions and strange longings behind the most ordinary relationships, life will never seem quite the same again.

This collection provides a range of romantic ironies. Sophie Hannah's poems move beyond satire to the heart of modern matter: loves, lusts, losses, and the foibles of contemporary life.

Alice's baby is two weeks old when she leaves the house without her for the first time. On her eager return, she finds the front door open, her husband asleep on their bed upstairs. She rushes into their baby's room and screams. 'This isn't our baby! Where's our baby?' Her increasingly hostile husband swears she must be either mad or lying, and the DNA test is going to take a week. One week later, before the test has been taken, Alice and the baby have disappeared. Run away, abducted, murdered? The police who dismissed her baby swap story must find out, and as they do they find dark incidents in David's past - like the murder of his ex-wife...

Sally is watching the news with her husband when she hears a name she ought not to recognise: Mark Bretherick. Last year, a work trip Sally had planned was cancelled at the last minute. Desperate for a break from her busy life juggling work and a young family, Sally didn't tell her husband that the trip had fallen through. Instead, she booked a week off work and treated herself to a secret holiday. All she wanted was a bit of peace - some time to herself - but it didn't work out that way.

Soap opera storyliner Simone Purdy - self-appointed Superpower of Love - knows what her friends need, now all she has to do is convince them that she's right. However, unusual complications seem to be materialising in all of their lives.