The men and women in these stories, and perhaps most of all the children, make their own sense of a world where "There are forces at play so simple, natural, and accidental that nobody can figure them out and see them coming." It is a world, too, in which "there's lots more sorrow flying around people's heads than there is joy." That sorrow may be heartbreaking, occasionally it is horrific; but the reader is constantly reminded, with the quiet, clear-eyed and sometimes mischievous irony of Harriet Richards' voice, that in this world and - in the least likely places - we may entertain angels unawares.

Harriet Richards's creative reality was as a visual artist until an obstinate painting, based on a recurrent dream, insisted on becoming a short story. She has since published three books of fiction. The Lavender Child was nominated for the Fiction Award and won the First Book Award at the Saskatchewan Book Awards in 1998. Waiting for the Piano Tuner to Die was nominated for Book of the Year at the 2003 Saskatchewan Book Awards, and in 2003, The Pious Robber was nominated for Book of the Year and won the Fiction Award. Her short fiction has been published in literary journals in Canada and Wales, and her paintings have appeared on book covers in both countries. She has mentored emerging writers through the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild, and has edited numerous books of fiction and literary essays for writers across Canada.

Harriet Richards' profile page

• Short-listed, Book of the Year, Saskatchewan Book Awards

"If you believe life is little more than a series of disappointments followed by death, then the ten stylistically dazzling stories in Harriet Richards's Waiting for the Piano Tuner to Die may well convince you to change your tune.A piano tuner adjusts the instrument's strings to ensure it sounds harmonious. The same might be said of Richards's talent for creating organically unified short fictions of the first order."- Judith Fitzgerald, The Globe and Mail

"While lyrical and affecting, there is nothing precious, nothing sentimental in this collection. It's edgy fiction grounded in the flat and vast Saskatchewan landscape: the environments are expansive but the stories dig deep."-Planet, the Welsh Internationalist