"If you are a person of ordinary age living an ordinary life, you have already met most of the people you will ever know for the last time. It is not waiting for you somewhere ahead. It is behind you already. Already done. Already filed among the ordinary days."

In these nine stories, the facts of the universe amalgamate with the grief of the everyday. These are a humble attempt to show that human beings and their lives are as extraordinary an event as the death of a star.

A woman in Kolkata keeps a list of every meal her dead mother cooked. A retired geologist tries to remember the name of a dog from 1971, after everyone who could confirm it has died or scattered. A father waits outside an ICU beneath a star that has been dying for ten thousand years. A small bird crosses an ocean it has never seen, steering by the ash of dead stars.

Nine stories about the cosmos and the kitchen. About everything that has already happened, and the ordinary evenings on which it happened.