A very good and experienced storyteller takes on modern topics for a short storiy collection.

• The main story has a new technology (a console) with which you can relive any moment in your life, which becomes an addiction, which cripples one's relstionship to the present.
• Boyle also tackles climate change: A couple in California lives through an unprecedented drought, which slowly eats away at their garden, and then at neighbor relationships. Pretty illustrative how climate change might creep in our lives, and how our social relationships might get strained.
• A teenage boy on an island which is overrun by a storm (which happens more often every year) leaves the village's shelter in the local school on the hill and wades through waste-deep water to get his mother's medication. Just a scene to illuminate a community in which the extreme has become normal, and the end (of life on the island) is an accepted future.

These are just three examples, which I picked because the topics are modern. Boyle is simply very good at what he does and the other stories are really good, as well.