All the Rage

A. L. Kennedy's riveting new story collection is a luscious feast of language that encompasses real estate and forlorn pets, adolescents and sixty-somethings, weekly liaisons and obsessive affairs, "certain types of threat and the odder edges of sweet things." The women and men in these twelve stories search for love, solace, and a clear glimpse of what their lives have become. Anything can set them off thinking—the sad homogeneity of hotel breakfasts, a sex shop operated under Canadian value…