If you judge a book by its cover, you're likely to dismiss this collection as easy-reading schmaltz. The youngish blonde in broderie anglaise frock hunched in a pose of mild distress does nothing to suggest the emotional depth of Robin Black's territory, nor the elegance with which she describes moments of reckoning for her characters  among them a blind girl who sees more than her parents imagine and the portrait painter coming to terms with mortality. Black was in her mid-40s when she got a publishing contract, and although she taught creative writing there is nothing whimsical about her subject matter or studied about her style. Even the title story, written entirely in the conditional, in which a woman attempts to tackle a neighbour's behaviour, escapes the confines of grammar games. Black's characters have substance and there is a solidity to their dilemmas. Perhaps a greying woman on the cover would not shift so many copies, but Black shows that middle and old age are stages in life very much worth examining.