Description

‘One of the best new collections I’ve read in a long time’ TELEGRAPH 5-STAR REVIEW

‘Camille Bordas is an invaluable new voice’ GEORGE SAUNDERS

A young woman takes stock following a burglary. A teenager becomes obsessed with the obituaries in a weekly magazine. Grandchildren mourn the grandparents who loved them and the ones who didn’t. Painters and almost-painters try to distinguish Good Art from Bad Art. People grapple with life-altering illness, unrequited love and promises they have every intention of keeping. Some win the lottery. Some don’t.

In this prismatic new collection, Camille Bordas’s complex, wry, sometimes dark and always self-aware stories open a window onto the truths and misapprehensions of our shared, flawed humanity.

Publisher Review

It’s not often that I find a collection in which every story is my favourite, but that is true here. Bordas’ writing is generational – anxious, self-deprecating, witty, nihilistic – but what sets her apart is her incredible inclination for surprise. Each of these stories – like life – is its own singular, meandering, unguessable journey — Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes and Gunk Camille Bordas writes toward the quiet pressure points – the joke with a bruise under it, the love that won’t behave, the losses that don’t end when the funeral does. The prose is exact, unshowy, funny when it hurts to be, and tender without asking for mercy. These stories don’t close so much as continue inside you. They tilt the world and don’t set it back, leaving you to live with the shift — Morgan Talty, author of Fire Exit and Night of the Living Rez Bordas’s narrators share a particular sensibility – smart, mordantly funny, and sharp-eyed about contemporary life on both sides of the Atlantic – but the stories themselves never land where you might expect. I hope this is the first of many collections, because I want to be reading Bordas for the rest of my life — Nell Freudenberger, author of The Limits and Lucky Girls Praise for Camille Bordas — : Brilliance is on display — Percival Everett Funny, humane and slyly philosophical — Zadie Smith Funny, intelligent and has much to say about how we live now * Financial Times *