The Price of Being Human

The follow-up to the acclaimed The Price of Being Human returns with more stories that refuse to let you look away.

In this second volume, P.A. Farrell once again turns her psychologist's eye on the moments that define us?the choices made under pressure, the truths kept just out of reach, the small kindnesses that no one witnesses and the quiet damage that takes years to surface.

These novellas span the full range of human experience. A man puts on his best suit for a day that is already slipping away from him. A woman inherits a debt she never agreed to carry. A child survives something no child should face and grows into someone complicated and real. A stranger's simple act of empathy cuts through years of armor in the space of a lunch break. A secret kept too long becomes a wall that no one can get around.

Farrell writes the way people actually live?in fragments and contradictions, in moments of unexpected grace and avoidable ruin. Her characters do not explain themselves. They simply exist, fully and without apology, and the reader is left to decide what to make of them.

This is literary fiction for people who do not have time for pretense. Direct. Honest. Built around the kind of human behavior you will recognize even when you wish you did not.

Readers of Book Two will find:

• Over twenty complete short stories

• Stories that range from corporate betrayal and moral failure to unexpected compassion and hard-won dignity

• Writing that is psychologically grounded, emotionally direct, and never condescending

• Characters who feel real because, in every way that counts, they are

Can be read as a standalone collection or alongside The Price of Being Human, Book One.

Fans of these authors will find a home here:

• Jodi Picoult • Ann Patchett • Elizabeth Strout • Celeste Ng

If Book One changed the way you look at the people around you, Book Two will finish the job.