WHAT DO WE OWE THE STRANGER? WHAT DO WE OWE THE DEAD?

A Japanese man paints a second eye on a doll. A widow holds an injured gull to her chest and cries by the sea. A grieving child climbs a stack of pallets to send a lantern into the sky. A chess player forfeits a game he was winning. A man places three red tulips on a grave.

Marc Joan's critically acclaimed short fiction spans Geneva and San Francisco, Cornwall and Cambridge, Wales and India, the very old and the not-so-old – and the distances between the people who live in them.

Written with delicacy and the occasional dark twist, Smorgasbord is about what we carry across borders – grief, memory, guilt, old age – and what we leave behind.