A combination of circumstances led former high-end lawyer Paola Lenger (a pseudonym) to have the first edition of her collection of short fiction Looking out the Kitchen Window edited and published in The Netherlands. Balking at no instance of human conceit, cynicism and defeat, matter-of-factly explicit about sexuality and cruelty, but tender on love and appreciative of art, Looking out the Kitchen Window, with its novel approach to story-telling, offers an absolutely dazzling reading experience. Having taken up the book the reader will soon find herself immersed in a world where love and visceral sex, tenderness and violence, achievement and failure, intellectualism and vulgarity, the philosophically meaningful and the mundanely trite go hand in hand or, as the case may be, bloodily compete for the reader's love of language, her sense of beauty and her penchant for the perverse.