From a man with a hair fetish to a younger sister fighting to accept her elder sister’s marriage, from a retiree downgrading from the terrace house where he raised his family to a fantastical history of a local neighbourhood, from a security guard’s relationship with a Filipino maid to an encounter with a building too avant-garde and high tech in design, from a taxi driver bumping into his ex-wife within his cab to an imagined retelling of the life and times of Mimi Wong (the first woman executed for murder after Singapore’s independence): each story within Spaces: People/Places explores the interior landscapes of the various protagonists and/or the exterior settings amidst which each protagonist functions through various experiments with form, point of view, mood and tone. Verena Tay’s second short story collection is a book that, once opened, you can’t put down.