In the Driver's Seat

A dark, dazzling, surprisingly funny new collection of stories ("Masterly" -Adam Mars Jones, The Observer; "A virtuoso performance" -Jane Shilling, The Sunday Telegraph) about single women and wives in various phases of midlife-anxious mothers, besotted mothers, beset mothers-in a (futile) search for security and consolation.

Helen Simpson's stories are short but by no means small. One story takes the Iraq war as its subject; another describes a smoker's reprieve from death by lung cancer; i...