Salt publishing 2011
Includes the story that won the V. S. Pritchett Prize 2008

This collection focuses on the way families function, including the different ways spouses negotiate their imperfect marriages. The story A Dangerous Place, which won the V.S.Pritchett Prize, explores how a couple interact in the aftermath of learning their son has been in a horrific car accident. A worthy prize winner, as Bernard MacLaverty says.

In other stories, the reader sees the world from a child’s perspective in which even ordinary events, like getting a bedroom of one’s own, become profoundly puzzling experiences.

Rogerson’s style is forensically cool and observant, while never sidestepping the intense emotional storms that can beset even the most conventional of lives.

‘Cynthia Rogerson is a new writer of great clarity and humanity – definitely one to watch.’
– AL Kennedy

‘Cynthia Rogerson tells a compelling and involving story.’
– Jackie Kay

‘Cynthia writes with delicate poignancy and wit. Her stories, sometimes funny, sometimes slightly surreal, sometimes unbearably sad, unravel seamlessly and with a sense of place. Her characters are always utterly real.’
– Isla Dewar

‘A Dangerous Place is an intensely felt and movingly rendered story.  A worthy prize winner.’
– Bernard MacLaverty

‘Cynthia Rogerson is a writer of tremendous heart and intellect and manages to combine the two without trace of sentimentality. Like Alice Munro she writes with startling authenticity and is a North American writer with Scottish sensibilities. Her humour is sly, her characterisation superb, she winkles out and makes heroic the average nerd in all of us. She is a courteous rebel and currently one of Scotland’s best writers.’
– Laura Marney

‘Cynthia Rogerson is a writer who brilliantly melds warm insight with sure eloquence, great characterisation with tight dialogue, terrific depths with vital subtleties. The overall effect is a literature that moves through beauty, humour and mystery towards a better understanding of what makes us human.’
– Kevin MacNeil

‘A Dangerous Place is told with a measured calm, almost a distance and certainly a lack of sentimentality.  Yet it is, when she decides to take us close, just a breath away from becoming intimate, moving, sad.  This is some feat for a writer, something we all want to achieve.  A beautiful short story.’
– Tim Pears

‘Rogerson is a master of fresh and sparky writing.’

– The Guardian