This is a collection of four long short stories. While I didn’t think that they lived up to Martel’s well-known novel Life of Pi, and the collection is uneven, it is certainly readable.

The strongest two stories are the first two, the title story and the one that follows it, which has too long a title to repeat here. The title story is about a college student who is watching his young friend die of AIDS. To help divert him, he invents a game where they each have to tell a story about a fictional family, the Roccamatios of Helsinki. Each story must relate to an important even in a subsequent year of the 20th century up to the present. The narrator does not relate the stories they told, only the historical events that inspired them. I have to admit I couldn’t always see how this related to the main storyline, and it is a complicated conceit, but it’s a moving story nonetheless.

The stories that weren’t so successful were a lot more obvious and ham-fisted about the emotions they were trying to elicit. They were also experimental in form, in a way that I didn’t think contributed much to the story. You can see that Martel is learning his craft in this early collection, and while I found it entertaining enough, I would recommend just reading (or rereading) Life of Pi instead.