15 kinds of desire

by Mandy Sayer

Book by Sayer, Mandy

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

222 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Mandy Sayer is an award-winning novelist and non-fiction writer. Her most recent book, Australian Gypsies: Their Secret History, has just been published by New South Press.

Reviews

[Felicity Waterford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful writing, even better than the first books of hers I’ve read.... I loved how the main characters of one story reappeared as bit players of another story later in the book... many twists and surprises with the last story ‘A true Story’ providing context to much of the writing The stories based in The Cross even more alive and vibrant than the other stories. An easy and well worth read. 8/10

[Chris Waterford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have liked Mandy Sayer's novels and memoir and these short stories are also well written and quirky and engaging. A good, light read.

[Chris Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

It paints a wonderful picture of Sydney in past hey-days.

[Imelda Judge · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no doubt Sayer is a skilled writer. I like her abilty to utilise stories we know well and recraft them into texts that confront us anew, with gender insensitivities that we pretend to pride ourselves are aspects of the past. Sayer reminds us that not much has really changed on this front.

[SHR · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this book. Each chapter explores a different type of desire and in doing so, a different way of people relating to each other and the world. Each story is stand alone but the characters appear in more than one story, as they touch each other’s lives (sometimes in profound ways, but always at the edges).

The prose is easy to read and flows well. The emotion of the pieces comes through in the detail of the stories. The other character in the book is King’s Cross (even though not all of the stories are set there, or even in Australia), and the location is important to the attitudes of the people at the centre of the stories, as well as their life experiences and resultant expectations.

Most of the characters are flawed and even those at peace with themselves are somehow sad. In many ways for me the most interesting aspect was not the desires of the characters, but the way in which they bumped into each other’s lives. I was always looking for a previous character to re-appear.

I think the most interesting story for me was one in which a wife makes her philandering husband (he appears in 2 other stories) magically disappear; it is all about perception and is it thought provoking.