My First Colouring Book — Lloyd Jones

Alternating between serious and absurd, these 25 very short stories are written in a variety of styles and often from an unexpected viewpoint, such as that of an old woman, a young man with a missing wife, and a surgeon who becomes a shepherd. A wry, experimental system of color coding -- with red for tragic stories, yellow for confessionals, gold for flights of fancy, blood red for laugh-out-loud humor -- these stories unfold in a bizarre town somewhere in Wales, where the inhabitants cross paths with each other, miss each other, and weave a weirdly familiar pattern of human existence.