A career-focused woman finds her life taken off course by an unexpected pregnancy. A troubled doctor abandons her family on her daughter’s birthday, the three-tiered pastel layer cake in the passenger seat beside her. A young mother must contend with how to explain her husband’s suicide to their child. In her first story collection, Lesley Trites digs bravely into the dilemmas faced by contemporary women who must be everything to everyone. Written with keen insight and deep affection, Lesley Trites’s A Three-Tiered Pastel Dream unearths pearls of wisdom from the secret lives of everyday women.