A Box of Matches

'Nicholson Baker is our foremost authority on life's unexamined routines, our laureate of ritual' Scotland on Sunday

A man gets up earlier and earlier each day, dresses in the dark, makes his coffee and lights the fire with a box of matches.

A man gets up earlier and earlier each day, dresses in the dark, makes his coffee and lights the fire with a box of matches. Then he rummages through the thoughts that crowd his head and preoccupy him. Here is mid-life domesticated man, whose thoughts veer brilliantly from love and marriage, to firelighters and suicide, in the twinkling of an eye.

This is Baker at his best, humorous and observant, revealing the underlying truths about the ephemerality of life, the joy of small things, the darkness just the other side of everyday life - all human life in a box of matches.