From bankers to circus artists, street people, online hook-ups (and more), Jerry Levy’s stories probe loneliness and missed connections with vivid imagination, humour and insight. Levy’s keen eye for human foibles and strengths make this a fascinating collection.

Jerry Levy deftly navigates that thin line between the everyday and the extraordinary as he serves up a host of original characters — a teenage girl thrust into raising her younger brother, a novelist with perhaps too much imagination, a man who breaks when a grape rolls under the fridge, another who teeters on becoming the father he never knew. Like our best short fiction, so many of these stories deliver the perfect twist — unanticipated and yet, with hindsight, exactly right.

An interesting mix of “slice of life” and speculative fiction that offers more of the same, in that the author shines a sharp white light on irregular things and people and keeps the beam in place while restless, unfulfilled characters unravel and their lives veer in new directions.

Levy’s quirky narratives provide a high-spirited alternative perspective on the crushing emotional isolation and myriad pressures that often accompany modern urban life . . . stretching the boundaries of narrative plausibility and occasionally veer into pure fantasy.

At times, Levy’s work has an almost supernatural quality, as he plays with the borders of reality and plausibility. But it works. His characters, no matter what their obsession or peculiarities, are all-too-human, and their trials, despite often being a bit otherworldly, reveal much about the nature of what is concrete and real.