An art teacher sends four of her students on a guerrilla mission. A young runner struggles to make sense of his best friend’s death. A health-food company adopts a farcical promotional strategy. A factory worker spends her days applying radioactive paint to watches, while dreaming of a future with her new suitor.

With a keen eye for detail and rich emotional insight, Laura Elvery reveals the fears and fantasies of everyday people searching for meaning.

A complex emotional intimacy is present in all of Elvery’s stories, but it’s her inventive characters meeting original circumstances that makes Trick of the Light that rare thing: a page-turning short fiction collection. The Saturday Paper

Radiant, accomplished and exquisitely written, this is an outstanding collection. Ryan O'Neill

Trick of the Light is at times haunting and poetic, other times bright and sharp, and always memorable and hopeful … This thoroughly profound, bold and playful debut pulled me along and pulled me apart. Brooke Davis

Elvery has a talent for portraying the minutiae of characters’ lives and then suddenly stripping the banal away, so that we are left staring at the bare bones of a life […] Elvery’s debut reads like a triumph of excavation – a collection in which dark matter is exposed and subsequently transformed […] An intriguing and powerful new writer. Overland