'Misunderstandings, uncertainties, belated understandings, useless remorse, treacherous memories, stupid and irredeemable mistakes, all these irresistibly fascinate me, ' the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi remarks. 'Life is by nature ambiguous and distributes ambiguities among all of us.' This side of life is reflected in these eleven stories. Is it choice, fate, accident, or even, occasionally, a kind of magic that plays the decisive role in the protagonists' lives?

Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa in 1943 and died in Lisbon, his adopted home, in 2012. Over the course of his career he won France's Medicis Prize for Indian Nocturne, the Italian PEN Prize for Requiem, and the Aristeion Prize for Pereira Maintains. A staunch critic of the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, he once said that "democracy isn't a state of perfection, it has to be improved, and that means constant vigilance."