Life-Like

Life-Like is a collection of twenty-six stories by Toby Litt, who considers it his most ambitious short fiction so far. It develops themes that first appeared in his earlier books Adventures in Capitalism, Exhibitionism, and I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay. The collection is emotionally compelling and formally inventive. It is about a globalizing, atomizing world, with stories set in India, Sweden, Australia and Iran, and it looks at how people meet and fail to meet, what connects them, and the themes of waste and communication, including communication through waste.

The stories begin with Paddy and Agatha, an English couple who last appeared in Litt's Ghost Story. After the stillbirth of their second child, their marriage gently starts to fall apart, and each of them meets someone new. Paddy meets Kavita, and Agatha meets John. Then each of those four people encounters another new person, and so on, in a doubling and redoubling of closely connected stories. The remaining stories show off Litt's unflinching prose.