'The mobile phone has changed our ways of waiting and worrying. It has abolished the poetry of railway stations, driven the soul from railway platforms; we no longer feel that anxious rush when the passengers start to get out. We are secure in the knowledge that if the person we're expecting had a problem, we would have got a call. 'But technology can only move the emotions around, not get rid of them...'Acclaimed French novelist Philippe Delerm brings a Parisian sensibility, full of irony and literary wit, to mediatized daily life as we all know it. In each of these ready-made sentences he reveals a wealth of subtleties, little failings, wry humour. The truths of our lives. These little stories move from the tender to the mocking and the melancholy, alighting on meaning in the words which fail us, and the moments all of us - especially those who are older - have lived.Translated by Eden Liddelow