Other People We Married (Riverhead Books) is a collection of charming stories by Emma Straub about contemporary relationships and loneliness.

The characters in these twelve stories are searching for something more out of their relationships: by hiring a pet psychic, inviting a gay best friend along on the family vacation, hanging out with a squirrel-shooting neighbour or just trying to figure out who their love belongs to (hint: it’s not their student, roommate or bird-watching instructor).

Straub’s style is spare and graceful, allowing subtle feeling and wisdom to take centre stage. In each story, characters struggle to resolve the awkwardness that comes with loving someone too much or not enough, suggesting that the world is a place of kind-hearted tyranny in which the best you can expect is disappointment.