This was just plain enjoyable to read. The short stories collected here are vivid and frequently violent, portraits of poverty that have an occasional edge of the fantastic. One of them begins with an ox exploding, another (the only straight fantasy of the bunch) involves an elderly man who coughs up a crow with an apparent hotline to the dead. The endings tend to the abrupt, or to the unexplained, and while there's a lot of tragedy here it's often undercut by a sort of wry humour. I was just very, very entertained - I love short stories and read a lot of them, and this is one of those collections where I'm going to have to get my own copy, I think, because I'll miss this one when it goes back to the library.