Collected Stories is a testament to Carey's remarkable imagination and his exceptional achievements in the short-story form. Double Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey's dazzling stories from The Fat Man in History and War Crimes are collected in one volume, together with three stories not previously published in book form. In each story Carey reveals the surreal within the ordinary. A man begins peeling off his girlfriend's clothes and then layers of her skin to discover another person underneath. A lone soldier who is guarding a fence that runs across the desert forgets which side is which. A mild-mannered architect, fearing that his lover will leave him because he is too ordinary, plots to steal a drug-dealer's secret cache.