Lovers give each other the silent treatment in the furniture store, people grasp 'me time' when the cinema film's run its course through the projector, and someone waits impatiently for word from beyond. All these and many more are here in this spread of very quickly-read short form comic fictions. Practically without fail they're presented as images in a 2x2 grid, somewhat stagey freeze frames from life, with no speech bubbles – just a yellow font with black border for clarity providing the voice-over kind of accompaniment. I didn't completely intentionally say it, but it stands true – these seem from life, as opposed from the mind of a creator, even if they show how contrived life can sometimes be with the tale of two people who scratch cars against each other's, or the vignette of how masking booze on your breath with peppermint chewing gum runs through the family.

Not all of them work brilliantly, but they do give a reflective spin on the modern world and how we're either happy to talk and are doing so, or unhappy about talking yet doing so, or happy to talk and can't, and so on. They certainly don't take too much time in the reading, and unless you really take against all the top-down images and the static nature of much of this – how if it were animated it would be one frame per second at most, and not at least 24 – this is an easy four stars.

Such a simple yet life-affirming and moving collection of comics. The chosen art style is wonderfully inclusive and consistent. Bolton manages to capture the universal human experience in a way we rarely see; these comics are not heavy with the creator's own emotion, instead each comic can act as a window or a door for the reader to access their own memories, their present, and their hopes and fears.

I have very mixed feelings about this one. It started off very promisingly. I love that feeling of loss and that search for a reason to live in the first few pages but then it drifts off onto different things. When I read it, I constantly got the feeling that I wanted it to go deeper into my head and my heart but it just never did.

Thanks to Ebury Press and Jordan Bolton for this review copy!

I love how this graphic novel celebrates the little things and how the most simple elements of our days are worth celebrating. I can imagine this book being a really good conversation starter and would work well as a coffee table book. The only thing I would’ve changed is I would’ve loved a bit more texture and warmth to the illustrations, but I liked the way that the writing was made the focal point regardless.

Unlike the other current other reviewer I quite enjoyed this. Some of the vignettes work better than others but the simplified single frame images are generally good and the images do seem to work with the poetic text. I suspect Mr Bolton's next work will be a bit stronger but this is a good debut.

I really didn’t think much of this, found the vignettes quite boring, cliched, and trite

The singular frames expressing the ‘shots’ of a film also felt stretched

Not one for me