It’s easy to get hooked on Carmella Gray-cosgrove’s debut book

The settings are largely contemporary Canadian cities — Vancouver, Montreal, St. John’s — although they also can roam to southern France and Egypt.

This volume includes 22 stories, varied in length and approach, but unified by author Carmella Gray-gosgrove’s touch and sensibility. This is her first book, and a clear demonstration of her flair and range (interestingly, she has an MA in Geography).

Short fiction requires a quick set-up. For example, “Warmer Soon” begins: “I was having a bad winter. They were going to fire me from the restaurant for sleeping through a staff meeting and eating day-olds that were garbage anyway, so I quit.”

Or “Today is the Day”: “Teeny is almost five months pregnant. Lucas is the babydaddy and he is bad news.” Or “Blue like the Sky”: “You are at the dinner party with your new girlfriend. I arrive late to the long table. There are ten people seated, eleven including me...”

Such jam-packed starting points help build the arc of the writing. No matter the length of the story, and some are less than two pages long, there is a full narrative bend, as well as high stakes, and a perilous edge.

The settings are largely contemporary Canadian cities — Vancouver, Montreal, St. John’s — although they also can roam to southern France and Egypt. These backdrops situate characters in shared Montreal duplex apartments, a bedroom in Marseille, a dance studio in Vancouver, a gallery opening in downtown St. John’s.

The milieu is often rickety and capricious, as the protagonists are usually young, and economically and physically emergent and vulnerable. They are just starting postsecondary studies, or working in cafes, or as nannies. They are flawed, tough, adaptable, resilient, spent, and unsettled. Sometimes violence or neglect has estranged them from their families; sometimes parental advice or support is the saving, mooring grace of them.

Descriptions are muscular and immersive. In the opening story, the unnamed main character is travelling to ballet class, carefully timing a call to her troubled sister so they will need to cut off at a certain point in transit.

“The hardest part of the ‘Dance of the Cygnets’ is the fifteen pas de chats starting from upstage right and travelling across all in perfect unison. Pas de chat means ‘step of the cat,’ and they are these jumps where you tuck one foot up to your crotch and then the other so there is a moment where you’re suspended with both legs bent up under you and then you land your feet in quick succession.”

The titular story is experimentally broken into half a dozen intersecting narratives, including “A story about an old woman who wants to have her ashes compressed into a diamond when she dies. Princess cut, or perhaps marquise, she thinks. She has very thin hair and a shiny scalp. She is obsessed with her possessions like Mrs. Gereth in the Henry James novel ‘The Spoils of Poynton’, but nowadays and lonelier.”

Another flourish is how Gray-cosgrove taps into timelines, as in “Corpus Christi,” at almost twenty pages one of the longer pieces here. Blake and Christine are a young couple, about to leave for separate universities, trying to spend as much of the summer together as possible. The breaking news is that Father Murphy, a figure well-known in their Catholic community, has been arrested for assaulting children years before, at Corpus Christi, a school long since mothballed, upending all kinds of generational assumptions about faith, tradition, and security. One of his victims is rumoured to be Roy Anderson, Christine’s cousin, who left the island as soon as humanely possible and enlisted.

Then a hurricane hits the Avalon Peninsula, causing flooding and disruption. They go out to investigate the damage and see an “officer is holding a roll of caution tape and a pylon, but when he tries to set the pylon down it floats, and there is nothing to tie the tape on to. As Blake and Christine approach, they see a body floating in the water.” Even though this comes near the end of the story, the last few sentences continue to both amplify and hone the conclusion. Gray-cosgrove doesn’t push or over-extend her endings, a good skill.

Her protagonists flail and fall but also unfold what wings of protection they can. In “The Cull” the preparations for the Vancouver Olympics are displacing wildlife; a coyote takes refuge in the lead character’s closet.

“She drew her lips up above her teeth and let out a growl. I backed out of the room, closing the door. I remember thinking how small she was. Small and vicious and mangy. I texted Dylan something like, ‘Hypothetically what would you do if there was a coyote in your house?’ and I texted my boss, ‘I’m running late, family emergency.’”

And we’re hooked. Gray-cosgrove’s writing is nimble, penetrating, frisky stuff.