THE BROWN ENVELOPE and other stories

Every story is a moral problem. A consultant who realises, on the second client, that her first client is paying her brother-in-law's debts. An immigration officer in Halifax who must decide whether the IELTS score in front of her was earned by the woman in front of her. An IRB Persian translator whose ledger of small mercies has become, after eleven years, a confession he no longer remembers writing.

A citizenship judge in Brampton who recognises, in the woman about to take the oath, the wife of the man who once arranged her own marriage. Reconstructed from publicly reported IRB decisions, Federal Court judgments, and the published findings of Canadian immigration enforcement, these are not the cases the author has handled — but the machinery they describe is real. The fraud is real. The quiet officers, in his experience, are also real.

For readers of Jeffrey Archer's A Quiver Full of Arrows and Twelve Red Herrings, of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, and of anyone who has ever wondered who, exactly, decides whether a stranger gets to stay. A companion volume, The Folded Photograph, covers the Australian system. A third volume, set in the United Kingdom, is in preparation.