For Audrey Lind, working with clay still evokes memories of her favorite professor. The woman’s zeal for art history ignited Audrey’s own academic career—and her tweed blazers and British accent kindled her first female crush. After fate brings Audrey back to Northshire University to teach, she’s thrilled to be working alongside her former mentor, but the grumpy woman she encounters upon her return is nothing like the dynamo she remembers.

Penelope Boswell is my best friend. She’s my person. She’s who I call when I have good news and bad. She’s my comfort. My solace. But in the same breath, she’s my want, my longing, my ache. She isn’t mine. She never will be. It’s a special kind of cruel to be in love with someone you shouldn’t. To know your heart beats for someone you can never have. One phone call in the middle of the night, two thousand miles between us, and everything changes. She’s hurt. Sad. Broken. She needs me. He broke her, and now it’s my responsibility to step in and pick up the pieces…

Handywoman Rowan is rooted in her small-town community, accepting every odd job to keep her family's hardware store afloat. When she inherits an old house, it's the perfect opportunity to flip it to pay off her mom's debt. She never intends to get tangled up with beautiful, adorably nerdy Maia, a visiting big-city radiologist, staying at her aunts' place to mend a broken heart.

Dani Bond may be young but she knows what she wants. Design sustainable buildings for her father's development company and marry her best friend since elementary school, Kelly Tompkins. Easy, right? Her socialite Mom has other ideas. Determined to groom a pageant queen, her mother's matchmaking attempts and warnings of unsavory rumors fail to dampen Dani's growing fondness for Kelly. The farmer's daughter with eyes blue as Texas skies and a dazzling smile had captured her heart on day one.

Writing from an impressive range of perspectives—men and women, children and adults, immigrants and tourists—Puchner deftly exposes the dark, tender undersides of his characters with arresting beauty and precision. Here are people fumbling for identity in a dehumanizing world, captured in moments that are hilarious, shocking, and transcendent, sometimes all at once. Unfailingly true, surprisingly moving, and impossible to forget, these stories make up an extraordinary and strikingly original collection.