The book comprises seven interlinked stories about a young boy, Peter Fortune, whose daydreams place him into various fantastic situations: he discovers a cream that makes people vanish and makes his family disappear, he conquers a bully on the thought that life was a dream so he had nothing to lose but to wake up, he switches body with his cat and fights off a new tabby stray, he transforms into his baby cousin and experiences the joys of being a toddler, his sister's dolls become alive and attack him, he imagines that the old neighbor becomes a thief and, in the last story, he turns into an adult and discovers that adults' lives are not as boring as he thought.

[4] David Malcolm in Understanding Ian McEwan (2002) writes that in the novel Peter, in his unconstrained world, moves between ordinary and impossibly fantastic situations.

He compares it to First Love, Last Rites (1975), McEwan's first collection of short stories, because they both contain exciting, frightening, and loose worlds.

[5] American novelist David Leavitt in The New York Times praises McEwan's imagination, but writes that "fantastic passages" are infrequent and a larger portion is devoted to charting the "everyday calamities of Peter's suburban life", that the staples of the genre "get dutifully dragged out for a rehash."

[6] Paul Taylor writes in The Independent that McEwan, whose early novels concerned "dark and deviant" material, was "too strenuously engaged in keeping the sweetness-and-light levels high".