Looking for a spun-sugar, cotton-candy summer beach read?

Keep on looking.

Lisa Glatt’s latest book, The Apple’s Bruise, is anything but. The tempting, polished short story collection by the best-selling author of A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That is both tart and sweet. Crisp and fresh. Difficult to swallow at times but totally satisfying.

The anthology is full of people on the edge — of danger, damage, trouble, heartbreak — fighting for what they need to make it through. A little girl healing from a car accident discovers the strength to stand up to a bully. A widow reckons with her teenage son’s new rebellion. One woman, recovering from breast cancer, reconciles with her husband; another copes with her husband’s obsession with a stripper by sleeping with the strip club bouncer.

Serious, sexy, sad, and substantive, The Apple’s Bruise is golden delicious — so tasty you may not even notice that it’s nourishing, too.

Available online at powells.com or your local bookstore.