In this brilliant volume, nothing is quite as it seems. We meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a lost man who bets on a horse that may—or may not—have spoken to him. Everything that fans love about the novels of Kate Atkinson is here—the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations of human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop.

Witty and wise, with subtle connections between the stories, Normal Rules Don’t Apply is a startling and funny feast for the imagination, stories with the depth and bite to create their own fully-formed worlds.