A “bloody, believable and intoxicating” collection of short stories by the acclaimed author of Born Free (The Herald, UK). Laura Hird became one of the most exciting new voices in Scottish literature with her Whitbread Award-shortlisted debut novel, Born Free. Known for pitch-perfect characters dealing with the despair and dysfunction of contemporary life, Hird continues to mine this trademark territory in Hope and Other Urban Tales. Set in the low-rent areas of Edinburgh, Hird’s slices of reality are gritty, bleak and often darkly funny. Yet the possibility of hope, always just out of reach, unifies this collection, conveying that just as circumstances can reveal the morally obscure darkness in ‘good’ people, so can seemingly irredeemable characters harbor well-hidden pockets of humanity. “Hird reminds one of an early Ian McEwan or Iain Banks, deeply unsettling, deathly comic and peculiarly tender.”—Sunday Times, UK “Hird controls her material brilliantly. If you like your fiction with razor blades secreted in the soup, then get this, pronto.”—Scotsman, UK