In “Terrific Mother”, Adrienne attends a Labor Day picnic, is handed a baby, and becomes responsible for a sudden catastrophe.

Adrienne withdraws from her former life, marries a man who tries to reach her, and travels with him to Italy, where guilt continues to distort every gesture of sympathy, desire and ordinary social contact.

First published in Moore’s 1998 collection Birds of America, the story shows her characteristic ability to make jokes operate as emotional scar tissue. The sentences are quick, odd and sharply comic, but the humour never releases Adrienne from what has happened; it reveals the desperate intelligence with which she tries to survive it. This standalone Faber Stories edition is for readers interested in compressed fiction, damaged intimacy, maternal expectation and the unsettling places where comedy and devastation become impossible to separate.

Faber & Faber, 2019. Faber Stories paperback. Light edge and corner wear.