A man and a woman, who have only known each other for a few hours and must soon part, sit in an airport café and invent an entire shared life together. A girl born with two different eyes - one seeing only the past and the other only the future - strives for the unattainable now. Late at night a father conspiratorially hangs laundry between two cherry trees in a tiny Bulgarian town in the 1970s and sets off a series of events that will turn absurdly historic. A woman on a train passing through the poppy-filled Central European countryside waves at everyone she passes, unaware that a single gesture can ripple through another's life like fate. A lonely drifter on a snowy New Year's Eve sees himself mirrored in a shop window TV, every move presumably watched by unseen millions and a world that had forgotten him. Here is a collection of Gospodinov's finest short stories.