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In 29 intimate, brilliant and funny essays, Claire Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia, the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt, and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk and Valeria Luiselli and examines three facets of Albert Camus and The Stranger. She tours her favourite paintings at Boston Museum of Fine Arts and in the luminous title essay explores her drive to write, born of the magic of sharing language and the transformative powers of 'a single successful sentence'. With a peripatetic upbringing, a warm and complicated family, her devotion to art and literature shines through and she proves once again she is 'an absolute master storyteller'. The essays have been collected from her other published work and include Our Dogs, Teenage Girls and How to be a Better Woman in the 21st Century. 306pp.