An accident, a suicide, an act of criminal negligence . . . and a near-death experience. The short stories in Emma Donoghue's Three and a Half Deaths - set in France, the USA and Canada - bring together calamities from two centuries.

'What the Driver Saw' is inspired by a freak accident on Nice's Promenade des Anglais, the 1920s equivalent of Princess Diana's last ride through Paris.

'The Trap' takes us to New York, 1878, when a woman at the centre of a public scandal decides that she's finally had enough.

Any thinking about death must of course include its lingering effects on the living; 'Sissy' explores the guilt and culpability of a woman whose young sister died in the 1840s in London, Ontario.

Finally, 'Fall' is about an incident at Niagara Falls in 1901 when a middle-aged schoolteacher staked her whole future on an act so daring it could be called suicidal. A near-death, a sort of rebirth: the kind of moment that makes visible the discreet courage it takes to live a whole life.

Born in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish writer who spent eight years in England before moving to Canada. Her fiction includes Slammerkin, Life Mask, Touchy Subjects, Frog Music and the international bestseller Room (shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes). She is also the author of the short story collections Three and a Half Deaths, Astray and Kissing the Witch.