The Price of Being Human

Some people leave a mark on the world with grand gestures. Most of us leave it through the small, quiet choices no one ever sees. In this powerful anthology of twenty novellas, P. A. Farrell takes us inside the lives of people you might pass on the street without a second glance-and shows you exactly what they are carrying. A housekeeper in 1987 Chicago who spends thirty cents to give a child something beautiful.
A dying ninety-year-old man discovers that the most important memories were being kept safe for him all along. A hotel maid who crosses a bridge every morning to clean the rooms of people who will never learn her name. A woman using a walker who is told, again and again, that her presence is an inconvenience-until one elderly man with a cane holds open a heavy door with his whole back. These are stories about the lines we draw between ourselves and the people we could help-and what happens when someone refuses to draw them.
A fifth-grade girl stands alone in a classroom full of children who signed a paper she would not sign and discovers exactly who she is. A professor threatened by a student learns that the system built to protect her was never really built for her at all. A whistleblower puts everything on the line to stop wealthy people from being poisoned and sold a beautiful lie. An aspiring actor learns that what keeps a person going isn't optimism-it's the will to keep working when the odds are clear.
A con artist who made her living giving false comfort to the grieving finally has to face the grief she never allowed herself to feel. From the streets of Queens, NY to the bays of Lake Michigan, from a chicken farm in summer to a locked psychiatric ward, from a luxury penthouse to a child watching the potatoes turn black in a bowl while something terrible happens through the wall-these twenty stories refuse to look away.
The price of being human is this: we see each other. We always have. What we choose to do next-that is the whole story. Twenty novellas. Twenty lives. One truth running through all of them: ordinary people are capable of extraordinary cruelty-and extraordinary grace. Sometimes both at once.