“There is no heaven on earth. Hope must be devised. Pretend.” So concludes Celia Marx, a wife and mother expressing both her hidden cynic and her risk-taking writer-self in “Home for Lunch,” one of 10 persuasive stories in Joan Alexander’s Lines of Truth and Conversation. Prone as they are to a certain muddy fatalism, Alexander’s characters often find themselves clinging to chance incidents or make-believe certainties in order to survive.

A Hanukkah party becomes the bittersweet setting for a stolen kiss. A midlife crisis manifests itself when a married woman falls for the man busy posturing – in more ways than one – on the neighbouring mat in her yoga class. A trio of connected characters struggle to come to grips with the beating death of an acquaintance/friend. The closing of a small independent bookstore, forced out of business by the newest mega-bookstore (with the brilliantly facetious name of Wonderment), becomes a metaphor for a larger sense of dislocation. Indeed, riding Wonderment’s escalator, the protagonist “panicked, and felt tragedy, the way she did on highways and roller coasters and sometimes even in department stores.”

But perhaps the most striking element of Alexander’s debut is her unsettling, gripping prose style. Many of the stories feature a deadpan diction that alternately belies and accentuates her characters’ sentiments. The novella-length “Five Months,” which tackles the narrator’s father-in-law’s slow death from cancer, is a clear-eyed catalogue of physical and emotional reprieves and regressions. Similarly, “Snap,” a first-person account of a miserable childhood, has a plainspoken, memoir-like feel, yet avoids the genre’s sometimes obvious grabs at poignancy.

The persistent darkness in some of these stories can be rough on a reader – ingesting more than two in one sitting is not recommended – but the collection is no stranger to wry humour and the occasional surrealist quirk. The playfulness doesn’t always pay off, but Alexander’s forceful, distinctive voice – plus her willingness to pull at the seams of a story – insures the collection lives up to its title.