This collection explores the world of the Costa Prize winning story Millie and Bird: a northern landscape of fragile lives bound by the invisible threads of place. The stories in this haunting collection have appeared in literary journals and on prize shortlists with Millie and Bird winning the 2012 Costa Short Story prize. A soldier flees the enemy, a woman buries a pig, a girl goes in search of her father — these are stories of northern lives, of what is lost and found, and of how we survive. A prize winning collection: these are the people who live in Paradise, their lives fragile, caught like sheep's wool on wire, each with its own unique story and secret heart.