A New York Times bestseller

'I have always had faith that the best writers will rise to the top, like cream, sooner or later, and will become exactly as well known as they should be . . . With the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves.' Lydia Davis

For the last fifty years Lucia Berlin has been one of America's best-kept secrets, celebrated by those in the know. The first publication of this collection of her astonishing short stories, in 2015, came a decade after her death and saw her rightly recognized as one of the most important writers in twentieth-century American short fiction. Her work has been compared to Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, and Anton Chekhov.

Drawing on her own rich, itinerant life, Berlin invites the reader into a world of beauty, pain, laughter, drink and surprising moments of grace. In Mexico, Chile and the American southwest, in laundromats, hospitals, motels and bars, she crafts miracles from the everyday. Her voice is irresistible.

'In A Manual for Cleaning Women we witness the emergence of an important American writer.' New York Times

'Lucia Berlin's work is being compared to Raymond Carver . . . But only Carver's very final stories share Berlin's eye for the sudden exaltation in ordinary lives, or her ability to shift the tone of an entire story with an unexpected sentence.' Sarah Churchwell, Guardian

'Full of humor and tenderness and emphatic grace.' Washington Post

'Sharp, unpredictable, vital . . . [Berlin's stories] hit you with a force the moment you happen upon them.' Jackie Kay, Observer

'This career-spanning volume should reward readers who return to it for months, years, even decades.' Independent

'Berlin writes about extremities of shame, humiliation and degradation with a ferocious elegance that allows neither bleakness not sentimentality.' New Statesman

Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) worked brilliantly but sporadically throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s. Her stories are culled from her early childhood in various Western mining towns; her glamorous teenage years in Santiago, Chile; three failed marriages; a lifelong problem with alcoholism; her years spent in Berkeley, New Mexico, and Mexico City; and the various jobs she later held to support her writing and her four sons, including as a high-school teacher, a switchboard operator, a physician's assistant, and a cleaning woman.