Wild, sad and blackly funny: losers and loners, cowboys and ghosts, all quietly desperate for their worlds to change — and totally unprepared when they do.

A drama-school graduate with no work in lockdown signs up to a website where men pay to watch her cry. A gang of dead young men who jumped from the same bridge watch, month by month, as the newest arrival's younger brother walks the same road towards them. A mother joins an online forum for women whose daughters are taken underground for half of every year. A man drives his dead father's car off the road and wakes inside the Springsteen songs his father used to sing. A woman rescues a fox from the hounds, and the fox takes her house room by room.

Ranging from south Wales to the American West, these twelve stories move between monologue, choose-your-own-adventure, Victorian letters and near-future climate fiction, yet read as one book: each asks what happens to the life you did not live, and how late is too late to go back for it. Written from a Wales of estates, hill farms and dead-end afternoons, Dogs in a Storm is clear-eyed about what small places do to the young, without ever treating them as lost causes.