Angel Gabriel's Betrayal and other strange tales

The seven beautifully-crafted stories in this book introduce a world in which nothing is as it really seems on the surface, and where the results of hopes and dreams have little to do with planning and more to do with luck, fate and serendipity.
There's the immensely talented woman who builds her own man but does it only too well, the outwardly successful couple caught in a dysfunctional relationship neither seem able to break, and the mother from Hell who almost cripples her child with shame and embarrassment. There's the wife living with a man prone to, mainly, harmless obsessions, and another who escapes from a miserable marriage purely by accident. Along the way is a woman coping with pregnancy and what might be a ghost, and the sardonic tale of the only man in a community of women.
These startling and thought-provoking tales repay being read slowly.