Nightschool

All eleven of these stories take place in the same building: a 1970s further education college in a town Everline never names, in the two hours after the day students have gone home. Adults come back to learn conversational Spanish, basic bookkeeping, life drawing, how to pass the test they failed at sixteen.

Everline is interested in the peculiar honesty of those rooms — the way people who have already failed at something once will tell a stranger anything, provided the strip lights are on and there is a break at nine. A woman in the ceramics class explains, to a man she has spoken to four times, why she cannot go home before eleven. A tutor marks the same three sentences for twenty years.

The stories talk to each other without ever becoming a novel. A caretaker walks through six of them. A fire door that does not shut properly recurs like a bad note. By the last story the reader knows the building's smell, its acoustics, and which corridor is cold, and Everline uses all of it.

This is a debut of remarkable poise. The comedy is exact and never cruel; the endings arrive a sentence before you expect them and are better for it.