Dancing On The Outskirts by Shena Mackay

A glittering collection of short stories that follows a cast of eccentrics, misfits and aging outsiders as they drift through suburban streets, dilapidated seaside towns and cramped London flats; each tale balances sharp, often wry observation with moments of melancholy, capturing the small humiliations and fragile pleasures of lives lived at the margins — artists, retirees, dreamers and lonely neighbours whose private oddities and abrupt intimacies reveal more about memory, loss and the strangeness of ordinary existence than their outward routines suggest.