Prerequisites for Sleep is a fictional world rich with dilemmas. From the young unwed mother paying the price for both her own mistakes as well as her family’s, to the woman whose unexpected late-in-life pregnancy wreaks havoc on her relationship with her teenaged daughter, to the man who finds a mysterious woman taking over his kitchen and his life, to the elderly woman trying to balance dignity with aggression management in her relationship with her Alzheimer-stricken husband, all the characters in the thirteen stories of this collection must make decisions and compromises that invite insomnia. Although most of these characters are firmly rooted in Stone's Maritime landscape, their challenges are universal. They are people we recognize. They step off the page alive as family, friends, and neighbours.

from Thomas And The Woman

Thomas woke up on a Tuesday morning to find a woman in his house. She was standing at the counter in his narrow kitchen with a spatula in her hand, flipping pancakes in his electric frying pan. He nearly bumped into her, not being fully awake and, of course, not expecting a person, let alone a woman, to be blocking his path to the coffee maker. He couldn’t entirely recall the previous evening to provide an explanation for her presence. His memory only offered vague glimpses of a barbeque with a horseshoe pit and chests of beer on ice.

She gestured towards his table, squished against the wall at the far end, where there was a place set with a fork and a knife and a mug of coffee and a glass of orange juice.

Easing around her, he sat in his chair and picked up the glass of juice and downed it in two gulps while she placed a plate in front of him stacked with several pancakes that appeared to have had thin wedges of apples pressed into them before they were flipped. He ate, the way hungry men do, concentrating solely on the food and the travels of the fork from his lips to the plate. Afterwards, eyeing the woman over the rim of his coffee mug, he decided that it was good. It being the food and the preparation of the food and the woman standing in his kitchen.