“Like Cheever or Munro, Russell Wangersky delves stealthily into disquieting corners of the domestic sphere.”—Globe and Mail

A man mourning his only friend contends with his guilt over an unspoken transgression. A member of a concrete crew compares his own friendships with his ex-girlfriend’s. An elderly woman in a care home struggles to recover speech after a stroke—and to explain her unsettled feelings about another resident. A young renter contemplates the lives of her homeowner neighbours. In stories reminiscent of John Cheever or Alice Munro, Russell Wangersky considers the ostensibly everyday to expose the sudden depths of feeling that undergird the most ordinary lives.

Praise for Russell Wangersky

“The Hour of Bad Decisions is a collection of beautifully crafted stories, clean and metaphorically rich. Portraits in time, they gesture toward the stubborn and inescapable bravado of error and mistake, and yet are heartbreaking for their helpless inevitability.”

—Commonwealth Writers Prize Shortlist citation

[Wangersky dissects] lives when they are fracturing