The desire to fall in love and have sex cause many of these characters to blunder as they grope their way towards some imagined (and never attained) idealised future. Darcy, in 'They Fuck You Up', is desperately trying on love; Claire, in 'Six Bedrooms', wants to play the role of girlfriend so much that she cannot see the possibility of true love and friendship closer to hand; and Rose, in 'J'Aime Rose', wilfully destroys a friendship because she wants to experience passion.

Although a craving for sex is central to many of these stories, Bennett Daylight's characters also hunger for transformation, for life to begin, and for a fully formed self to be realised. This is powerfully demonstrated in the beautiful 'Firebugs', where a brother and sister start small fires out of boredom and desperation. These fires represent moments of futile anger. They are never enough to spark the longed for phoenix-like transformation.

Bennett Daylight writes with a directness and clarity that only sharpen the pain of these stories, using small perfect details to pin an image to the page. A man's kiss is a 'cold, chemical little offering, like a mollusc after the tide has gone out', and water glitters 'as though someone were typing light on to it'. There is also plenty of dark humour, in the fashion mistakes, in the dog that defecates throughout a speech therapist's house, in the Watership Down references, and in the extraordinarily painful and absurd bite of a tortoise.

'They do not belong and they know it, but nor can they quite lay claim to being misfits'

Adults hover at the edge of these stories, mostly absent through divorce or alcohol. Tasha's mother is the most sharply realised. She always has a glass in her hand, but Bennett Daylight never lets her become a stereotypical sad drunk who has been left by her husband. She is harsh and destructive, and then unexpectedly tender.

Tegan Bennett Daylight

These glimpses of adult life are not snapshots of happy or fulfilled lives. The parents who inhabit the edges of these stories lead lives that are so much less than the dreamed of futures envisioned by their children. This constant reminder of the considerable gap between the hoped for adult self, and the reality of life as we grow older, adds a further strain of pathos to what are already dark tales of growing up.

Fittingly, it is the last story, 'Together Alone', that really pulls apart the distance between the imagined idea of adulthood and the true nature of maturity. In this story, Tasha is an adult and her mother is dying. Tasha's marriage has fallen apart and although she is lonely and sad, she also experiences love and joy on a daily basis with her child. As Bennett Daylight describes it, the richness of this is like 'streams of gold' that run through her fingers. This is the nub of it: so often the longing for something else, for some miraculous transformation, blinds us to all we have now, including the relationships that really matter. Perhaps this is what it is to truly grow up, to be aware of our riches, and to allow ourselves to experience life as it is for us in that moment, just as Tasha manages to be present for her mother's death.

This last aching story provides the perfect ending, bringing all the pieces together. It is rare to read a collection of short stories that work so well individually and that also create such a satisfying and coherent whole.