“I remember thinking to myself, as I said goodbye to my friends and walked home through the dimly lit backstreets, that the past comes back to haunt everybody sooner or later.”

In this finely honed collection of short fiction, Dwayne Brenna creates a series of unforgettable characters, from academics and street people to musicians, movie stars, videogame players and their mothers, cooks, actors, boxers, and even a parrot, and, with compassion and affection (and sometimes laugh-out-loud humour) tests their mettle in a variety of fascinating locations, from Saskatoon to Victoria to Libya to Los Angeles to London to Hawaii and beyond, with familiar and homey details and a fidelity to mood and atmosphere.

Along the way, Brenna tackles a wide selection of conflicts and social ills—good versus evil, scruples and the lack of them, doing or not doing the “right thing,” yielding or not yielding to temptations, and the many other struggles of the human heart—all without being didactic or preachy, but simply by addressing the very human circumstances his characters find themselves in, and how they manage to escape, or not escape, the predicaments arising because of who they are, who they’ve been, and who they could be.