This incisive, warm-blooded collection of stories is populated by outsiders: expatriates and repatriates, Vikings, travelling ventriloquists. Nearly half the stories are linked, tracing a romance between Jack and Sadie, whom we first meet in Ireland, attending Jack's sister's wedding to a Dutchman. Whether it's over the course of a honeymoon in Amsterdam or a day at a Texas water park, McCracken illuminates qualities of human nature through fragments of her characters' lives, much like the boy in the title story, examining ancient shards of pottery at a museum: "Looking at a piece of a thing, he might think, deduce, discover something nobody ever had, which was all he wanted in the world." An eccentric Italian bibliophile, Giordano Vietri, is the driving force of this assured début novel. The narrator, Gabriele, working in a Berkeley bookstore, receives hundreds of Vietri's requests for obscure titles, and, as she ships them off to him, at an address in Rome, she wonders if he is an academic or someone on a more personal quest for knowledge.

Spanish AI startup Narrativa is now helping to write select sports and finance articles for major Spanish media with its AI dubbed Gabriele. Select sports articles in Spanish media outlets El Confidencial, SPORT, El Periódico and El Español as well as the financial narratives of the newspaper El Independiente are being written by Gabriele, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed by the Spanish startup Narrativa that is capable of interpreting statistics data and generating news automatically. The sports media outlets have closed agreements with Narrativa that include articles of First, Second and Third Division, Copa del Rey, Champions and Europa League. They also cover European leagues in countries such as Italy, France, Germany, England and the Saudi League. Gabriele will soon write about all the federation leagues from Benjamín to Juveniles.