The Quick

A woman trapped in a plastic suit sprays poisons onto schoolyards in the deserted small hours of morning. Another aims her rage over the loss of her daughter to cancer at a small group of children on Christmas Eve. A teenage boy sees an apparition that may or may not be his estranged father. When the seemingly stable surfaces of their lives rupture, the characters in Scott’s award-winning collection discover in their efforts to cope an intimacy on which they hadn’t bargained: a disturbing intimacy with the self. Yet they also find strange moments of grace in things as small as a butter tart, as fragile as a coloured egg.