Sex and Death

by Sarah Hall (Editor), Peter Hobbs (Editor)

In this provocative and haunting collection of short stories edited by two masters of the form, a diverse group of contemporary writers probes the nature and connection between two of the most powerful, exhilarating, and terrifying forces that define and shape the human experience.

The drive for life—for survival and reproduction—and the drive for death—for violence and self-destruction—are the two dominant, instinctive urges of human behavior. These conflicting compulsions, characterized by Freud as Eros and Thanatos, are also the central themes of great literature. In Sex and Death, some of today’s most compelling writers from around the globe—Kevin Barry, Lynn Coady, Robert Drewe, Ceridwen Dovey, Damon Galgut, Petina Gappah, Sarah Hall, Peter Hobbs, Yiyun Li, Alexander MacLeod, Ben Marcus, Jon McGregor, Guadalupe Nettel, Courttia Newland, Taiye Selassie, Ali Smith, Wells Tower, Claire Vaye Watkins, Alan Warner, Clare Wigfall—explore these challenging themes with honesty, psychological acuity, brutality, tenderness, and empathy, in stories that are disquieting, illuminating, funny, and utterly dazzling.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies, Contemporary, Short Story Collection, Sexuality, Literary Fiction

336 pages, Hardcover

First published August 30, 2016

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Sarah Hall took a degree in English and Art History at Aberystwyth University, and began to take writing seriously from the age of twenty, first as a poet, several of her poems appearing in poetry magazines, then as a fiction-writer. She took an M Litt in Creative Writing at St Andrew's University and stayed on for a year afterwards to teach on the undergraduate Creative Writing programme.

Her first novel, Haweswater, was published in 2002. It is set in the 1930s, focuses on one family - the Lightburns - and is a rural tragedy about the disintegration of a community of Cumbrian hill-framers, due to the building of a reservoir. It won several awards, including the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book).

Sarah Hall currently lives in North Carolina. Her second book, The Electric Michelangelo (2004), set in the turn-of-the-century seaside resorts of Morecambe Bay and Coney Island, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book).

The Carhullan Army (2007), won the 2007 John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 2008 Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction.

Her latest novel is How to Paint a Dead Man (2009).

Reviews

[Briar's Reviews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sex and Death is a mixed bag of stories full of, you guessed it, sex and death.

This anthology features a large array of short stories. I say it's a mixed bag because, like any set of stories, some of them are amazing and some of them don't hit as well. What I've found is that it really depends on what type of reader you are. I really enjoyed some of the stories focusing on the family structure - George and Elizabeth by Ben Marcus, Fixations by Ceridwen Dovey, and Evie by Sarah Hall. The stories had me hooked and interested and somehow left me wanting so much more out of them. I wanted entire books for those stories! They were intriguing, well written and absolutely fantastic!

To highlight my three favourites:

George and Elizabeth follows George after his father died. He's in the process of seeing a therapist and reaches out to his sister. He meets his Father's ex-half-wife and participates in some situations that he might actually need therapy for. This slice of life story is crafted so beautifully that I wanted a full length novel of this book. George and "Pattern" (Elizabeth) are unique characters with a unique relationship. I need to find more books by Ben Marcus because he is just phenomenal at writing!

Fixations by Ceridwen Dovey follows Selene after the birth of her child. The difficulties of post-partum life and having medical procedures was really interesting to follow. Hearing Selene's point of view about how the midwives think she has post-partum depression but really it's from the physical pain of the childbirth was eye opening. I couldn't pull myself away from this book! Yet again, Ceridwen Dovey has an addicting writing style!

Evie by Sarah Hall follows a romantic pair who dip into something new. Tragedy strikes during their slice of life, and a relationship will be tested. This story was just too darn short! I wanted to see the fallout of everything that was happening because Sarah managed to get me attached to these characters. It is absolutely amazing what some authors can do with their words!

All of the other stories were well written but just didn't hit me like those three did. But, that's the point of an anthology! There are many different types of stories around one topic (this one being sex and death). Honestly, the way these authors dove into mental health, sex, ambition, life, and death was truly incredible. Hats off to these guys! Despite every author having a different writing style, all of these books felt like they fit in and that they should be winning some kind of award!

Some of the stories end in tragedy, some feature happy endings and some are just... there. There are very short stories and there are longer stories. What Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs have done is craft a beautifully arranged anthology that definitely should be in more readers' hands!

Overall, this was a marvelous read and I'm really happy I got the chance to read it! I've been staring at this book for ages while it sat on my shelf. I finally got the nerve to pick it up and devour it!

Four out of five stars! The stories ranged from one to five stars, but it'd be a shame to give it anything less than a four. As a complete set, this book stands out!!

I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

[kingdomofbookss · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the type of book that you won't be able to put down. It will make your heart ache and keep you on your toes. The stories in this book are so moving and so real. They are beautiful, tragic, sobering, brutal and each story has so much meaning packed as densely as possible into every bit of text. What I enjoy most about the stories is that they make you think, they leave the reader thinking about the undercurrents going on beneath the surface of character's actions. Beneath the story you read, there is an untold story that is not told but keeps you thinking. Most of the stories are very short, but could leave extremely impactful meaning. Every story has its own colour of contents and ends in a really satisfying manner.


This collection of stories hold true to the high standard of writing. The prose in these stories is so raw and relevant! Although all of the stories are fiction, they are all so eye-opening and mind-winding that cause the reader to just wonder how the authors even came up with this stuff.


This book contains amazing and beautiful stories that capture all types of minds. I highly recommend it to anyone who are looking for a new and fresh reading experience. This is probably a must read!

[☕Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not normally a huge fan of short stories. I often don't seem to "get" them. I am, however, a huge fan of Sarah Hall, and I really want to better understand the short story as a form, so I was eager to read this collection. For the most part, I really appreciated these stories. They felt largely more accessible than many I have read, and I wasn't often left with the feeling of incompleteness I often am. I am clearly too dense to fully comprehend the final story, however, and will need someone smarter than me to explain that one at some point. Overall, this is definitely one of the more enjoyable short story collections I have read. There seemed to be a lot more stories about sex than death for whatever that's worth.

[Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Some are good stories others are ok. I just can't bring myself to finish it right now, I feel like it's a chore.

[Kira Webster · Rating 2 out of 5]

For someone that has experienced a lot of both sex and death, I was excited for this book. I love anthologies, but more of the stories in this one were misses that hits. I'm not a big fan of realistic fiction, and it seemed that a lot of these authors were trying to write hyper-realistic stories that included both sex and death in normal ways, which was not what I was looking for out of this book. Perhaps if you're a realistic fiction fan, this book is more for you.

[Shanelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

I DNF’d it. I am not usually into short stories, and these short stories were weird, which made it worse.

[Mish Middelmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love the topics - about the most primally important I can think of - and patchy about the implementation. There was a bit too much of what felt like fashionably modern ennui for me.

What I liked best were some short, sharp, provocative stories that really had me think again, such as the opening story where the lead character's emotional infidelity is all in her imagination - the potential lover being already dead.

There were also great "slice of life" stories - I particularly loved Petina Gappah's story at the hairdresser's in Machipisa - next door to the place I worked and partied throughout the 1980s in Highfield, Harare, Zimbabwe.

And I loved the introduction:

How hard we try not to be frightened, not to let the mind and body misbehave, not to come undone... But underneath, closer than we dare to think, is the reddish nature of our humanity, the strong meat of our anatomy. The force that drives us on, generation after generation...

[Parmy Violet · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not finish this book. This is a collection of short stories, I read three of them and gave up. The point of a short story is to have a moral, or some sort of reason for existing, but these have nothing. An example of this would be (spoiler warning, I suppose? Not that there can really be spoilers as there are no twists or conclusions to any of the stories that I read) the third story is about a woman who has developed an anal fissure after giving birth. The story is just a documentation of how it is difficult and painful for her to use the toilet, then in the end she gets surgery. That's it. The ending is her lying in the operating table, falling asleep due to the anaesthetic. The first two stories were just as pointless and bizarre!

Maybe I'm not smart enough to understand the point in these, or maybe this just isn't the book for me, but this is the first book I have ever given up on and I look forward to returning it to my local library.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the disappointing love story anthology, i didn't really feel like reading another short story collection but this one was consistent! most of the stories have a punch and are warped,, the highlight being the Ali Smith one. A solid collection to dip in.

[Rebecca Rosenblum · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rarely bother to star-rate books anymore--it's so hard to get it right--but this one's easy. Almost every piece is a highlight of form, style, and substance, and even the pieces I didn't personally love I admired. An anthology of the highest caliber, and a joy to read.

[Sarah Jane Barnett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional.

[Marina Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eclectic, diverse, something for all tastes - a rich collection of short stories about the two most fundamental subjects in our lives.

[Story]

DNF

[Chelsea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some are good, some are just plainly confusing. Not sure it was me or the story itself.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic collection of short stories by Canadian and international authors that wasn't really what I was looking for but more than made up for it!

4.5 Stars














My favourites are noted below. Expand the spoilers if you've read it or don't mind further losing the element of surprise. Also, be warned that parts of this book, and this review, are 'rated R'.



'George and Elizabeth' -- Ben Marcus

Well-written, witty, surprising.

A sophisticated story. Elizabeth is a high-power woman who changed her name to 'Pattern'. George, her brother, likes to be alone and used to fuck anything.
Pgs 36-37: The men Liz goes for -- crazy.

"Me? I tend to date the house husband type. Self-effacing, generous, asexual. Which is something I'm really attracted to, I should say. Men with low T, who go to bed in a full rack of pyjamas. That's my thing. I don't go for the super-carnal hetero men; they seem like zoo animals. Those guys who know what they want, and have weird and highly developed skills as lovers, invariably have the worst possible taste -- we're supposed to congratulate them for knowing that they like to lick butter right off the stick. What a nightmare, to be subject to someone else's expertise. The guys I tend to date, at first, are out to prove that they endorse equality, that my career matters, that my interests are primary -- they make really extravagant displays of selflessness, burying all of their own needs. I go along with it, and over time I watch them deflate and lose all reason to live, by which point I have steadily lost all of my attraction for them... part of what initially arouses me is the feeling that I am about to mate with someone who will soon be ineffectual and powerless. I've come to rely on the arc. It's part of my process."

'Fixations' -- Ceridwen Dovey

Great! Love the opening, so witty and Australian too. The ending is ... ok.

A mom had a baby. Now she has an anal fissure. Page 45: "She had the dizzy feeling once again that she had disintegrated into nothing but a collection of limbs held together by failing viscera."
Page 47: "...she realized -- when your body stops working the way it should, you start to see anything involving the body as absurd, especially sex. The less of it you're having, the more bizarre it begins to seem, the more unthinkable it becomes as something anyone would choose to do. She was thinking about sex all the time, but not in a good way. She could not believe she'd ever had it, that anyone in the history of humankind had ever had any."



'The Postcard' -- Wells Tower

Sophisticated writing, metaphors and word-play about an awkward affair in Amsterdam involving an older famous woman and a younger man.

Page 64: About Clement: "So lovely, in fact..." Pages 76-77: Interesting discussion of the World Trade Centre with a well-inserted character.



'Evie' -- Sarah Hall

A woman's personality begins changing rapidly, dramatically, and erotically...

Page 91: A rundown of past girlfriends, all of whom seemed unique and interesting, all of whom disappointed.

"He'd had a spell of dating women with interesting names, in and after university: Lola, Oriana, Kiki, Simone. They were never as interesting or free-spirited as their names suggested...and he had gone through a number of them, telling himself he was on a romantic quest. They were all trying for unique jobs -- dance therapists, writers...they were confident at first, sometimes conceited. He encouraged them to audition for the part, which gave them licence. Once the novelty of the sex wore off, once they failed to be uniquely talented, he struggled to make a connection. Under the faux exoticism, they wanted husbands, money, three-storey town houses. Or they really were fucked up. By six weeks he was usually disappointed or bored. Or things had exploded."

Pages 98-100: How to conduct a threesome

- Evie has a brain tumour, and that's why she started eating chocolate, candy, talking crazy, and being a horny nutter.



'Where hast thou been' -- Jon McGregor

Nice one! God is a character. Fun, 'stream-of-consciousness-style' tale about a 22 year old virgin male who simply must get laid, and some adventures.


Page 116: Talking to girls, not knowing what to say or how to say it to have sex, not feeling wanted or fuckable -- relatable to many a late virgin I reckon...

"I didn't know how lost I was. It wasn't that I didn't know how to talk to girls but there were some things I just couldn't say. Some of my best friends were girls and we talked a lot. I never knew how to get to where the talking would stop; if there were cues I was missing or questions I was failing to ask. At heart I assumed that no one would want me so there seemed little point taking the chance."

Page 123: "God made me do it..."




'10 Item Edinburgh Postpartum Depression Scale' -- Claire Vaye Watkins

A woman, and a couple, have a baby.


Page 129: "As much as I ever did..." -- used throughout the story in various interesting ways -- brilliant.

Pages 130-131: "Doula -- the mom you wish you'd had"

Page 133: "Q: Do you still want to be married? A: As much as I ever did. The world slips out from under us approximately every hour and a half."




'Reversible' -- Courttia Newland

I don't want to spoil this one at all. Just read it. Short and sweet. A London police shooting in reverse. Neat



'The news of her death' -- Petina Gappah

A British/Nigerian woman meets a cast of gossipy characters in a Nigerian beauty salon. Fun! Would make a nice short play.



'Visitation' -- Damon Galgut

A man on a train in South Africa, escaping his life and an incident in Cape Town. Page-turning.



'Frank's Last Days' -- Guadalupe Nettel (Translated by Rosalind Harvey)

In Mexico, a college girl accidentally finds her long-lost, mysterious uncle, the black sheep of the family.



'Porto Baso Scale Modellers' -- Alan Warner

Unique, quirky, darkly funny. A group of single, Euro, middle-aged, ex-pat men in Spain, who live for scale airplane modelling are shocked and confounded when an attractive young divorcée shows up and is not only interested, but also better at modelling than them! Unique.

Page 198: "Sub-consciously, we had all began diets..."

Pages 204-205: The woman astounds the men with tales of sex and depravity taking place behind a local island. Orgies and swinging and condom-less barbarity. At the end, the narrator notes: "There was something of a pause." Ha!




'Fin' -- Lynn Coady

A young couple move into a wonderful new house, and the man promptly breaks them up and leaves. The woman's situation is described in brilliant detail.

Disbelief, confusion, life interrupted, hollow manuals and cultural guideposts, uneaten food, a life left in limbo, the tragedy and shock of it all... no traditional closure ending.



'Brunhilda in Love' -- Taiye Selasi

Brunhilda fantasizes about her non-sexual husband having an affair with his gay male trainer...



'The Closing Date' -- Alexander MacLeod

A(nother) young couple buy their dream house in Halifax, Nova Scotia, but thee thee thee that's not all folks.

Page 260: "An extra FLOOF of air." Love it.

Excellent description, great story. There is a murderer referred to as "The Murderer" who stayed in the motel room next door to the fictional (?) family, interacted with them and their little girl, and even saw the wife half-naked. The same night the couple have wild, passionate, pregnant sex -- the first sex they've had in ages, the murderer next door killed another of his victims.




'The Fortune Fish' -- Clare Wigall

A middle-aged man from San Francisco runs into an old lover from the hippie days.

They had met when she was a tarot-reading 17 year old flower girl trying to survive in San Francisco, and he was a local college drop out having lots of sex with lots of young and easy 60s girls. On page 298, he realizes he may have fucked up her life and his own, due to his inability to love (she had fallen in love with him) and the 'incident'. One night, back then, the two of them picked up a random hippie girl on the side of the road and brought her home to 'party'. The girl ended up nearly killing his lover by straddling and strangling her after nearly bringing her to oral climax -- while he watched, and before he had sex with the hitchhiker.

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of stories was first published in 2016 – I must have missed it then. I only found out about it when I saw an item by Jonathan Gibb who had been using this in his MA Creative Writing teaching at the University of London.

What a great selection of writers, styles and approaches to the subject matter. I am also a late comer to the works of Sarah Hall, but everything of hers that I have read has been excellent. That includes the story in this collection called ‘Evie’, about a woman who, all of a sudden, comes over all strange, changing before her husband into someone who needs two lovers at once. A tumour is turning her into someone he hardly recognises.

As well as the obvious sex and death, there is also a good amount of humour – in particular I loved the level of parody in Alan Warner’s story ‘Porto Baso Scale Modellers’ about a group of three middle aged men who live in Spain and have a club whose purpose is to build scale models of aeroplanes. The level of specific detail, about planes and scales and paintwork, makes this lots of fun, and the sad old men are in for a shock when an attractive young woman joins the club and proves to be a better modeller than all of them. Food-stained Hawaiian shirts are suddenly out and crisply ironed shirts and haircuts appear at the next meeting. They are a sad old bunch but I am sure they could really exist, or something very similar.
Jon McGregor’s story of Yorkshire student days ‘Where Hast Thou Been’ was also a standout for the characters and the regional voice. Always risky to include regional voices, this is done by using just the right amount of slang and sound – for example:

“Eh up,” he said. “You tried these vegan sausage rolls? They’re well mint.”

By starting with the ‘Eh up’ – a well-known (but much parodied) Yorkshire greeting – he has immediately set the tone for the rest of the sentence and the character.
Claire Vaye Watkins uses the Edinburgh Postpartum Depression Scale as the frame work her story, helping a new mother to ask and answer numerous questions about her state of mind. The choices of four answers for each question stay the same, ranging from at best “As much as I ever did” to the worst “Not at all”. There is something about the phrase ‘as much as I ever did’ which has an implication of it still not being that great. For example when used to answer to the question ‘Do you still want to be married?’, or “Do you think having a baby was a good idea.’
In response to the question I have felt sad or miserable, the reply begins:

I can hear the whispers of my own future outbursts: I wiped your ass, I suctioned boogers from your nose, I caught your vomit in my cupped hand and it was hot! I cut the tiny sleep dreads from your hair and blew stray eyelashes off your cheeks. I can feel the seeds of my resentment as I swallow them.

Wells Tower’s story about Cora, a celebrity photographer whose fortunes change when Beyoncé refuses to come out of the bathroom and be photographed. The shot of the bathroom door, Mike Jagger behind a trellis, and Angela Merkle behind an armoire, turn Cora into a sensation. And then I love these lines:

She was paid to give masterclasses at universities that had rejected her student application. Collectors bought prints for significant sums. In an absurd eversion of her own intent, the celebrity photographs – an aria to nothingness sung in the key of contempt – had, in her narrow corner of the world, made Cora Jakes a star.

There are twenty stories in all, collated from around the globe, all of which have something to teach us about the medium of the short story.

[Peter K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like any collection of short stories, some are going to grab the reader's attention more than others and this was the case with this collection for me.

Having just read and really enjoyed a work of Sarah Hall I had high hopes for this book particularly given the elemental subject matter.

There were a small number of excellent stories here, those by Sarah Hall herself and Jon McGregor being the ones the stood out for me.

A number of them never really blossomed for me , didn't really develop, felt a little too short.

[Olivia Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of those short stories were fantastic and some were positively average, so I think 4* overall is fair. My fave was Dr Pacific.

[Anne Logan · Rating 2 out of 5]

All my reviews can be found at ivereadthis.com

I find short story collections extremely hard to review, but this is the case even more so when the collection of stories is an anthology made up of various authors because there is such a huge span of talent and writing throughout. Sex and Death, edited by Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs is an incredibly varied grouping of stories all about how we come into this world, and how we go out. Yes, the topics are somewhat similar, but each artist has their own take on what sex and death means (as they rightly should) so we’ve got a mixed bag of treats with this one. We’ve got stories about loved ones recently deceased, a woman developing a sex addiction because of a growing tumor in her brain, even a tale of a new mom agonizing over a recently developed anal fissure shortly after her baby’s birth (!!!). There is literally, something for everyone.



My favourite story was oddly titled “Porto Baso Scale Modellers” by Alan Warner, which was one of the most clever and hilarious things I have read in some time. It’s about a group of middle aged men who take their hobby of assembling miniature models of planes very seriously, and a gorgeous, sex-addicted woman joins their group because she has a remarkable talent for their nerdy little endeavor. I could read this story over and over again I loved it so much. And many other stories were very well-written, “The Postcard” by Wells Tower in particular had some beautiful turns of phrase, this one stuck out for me:

“Still, she had wished she had not heard the story, which was like a giant crystal chandelier Clement had put into her hands with instructions to never set it down” (p. 70).

Despite the above stories mentioned, I can’t say I really loved this book. Many of the stories were unremarkable, things I just wanted to get through until I was done the book. I really enjoyed a few of the stories, and disliked or was bored by many others. Even the Canadian contributions to this international collection let me down, which I’m ashamed to write, but would feel untruthful if I didn’t mention.

Many people shy away from short story collections, and now I think I see why. Once you’ve finished reading all the stories, you don’t get the satisfaction of having completed a novel, even if you didn’t really like it. I don’t want to say reading this was a waste of time because I discovered some authors I would have never know about, but I think the collection could have done with a more discerning edit.

[Nick Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of stories. Sarah Hall’s story Evie was the stand out for me.

[Ted Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to admit that I bought Sex & Death more or less in error, thinking it to be a new collection of short stories from Sarah Hall; it isn’t, it’s a collection comprising a wide range of authors, and edited by her and Peter Hobbs, whose own story, the slightly surreal In the Reactor, is a standout contribution. Hall’s tale here, the disturbing Evie, I eventually worked out I’d read before in her previous collection Madame Zero (though the notes tell me that it also appeared in The Times), but it was well worth a second visit. All said then, this is an excellent collection, and the best themed one I’ve come across in a while.

Despite the slightly restrictive scope given by any anthology with a specific focus, Sex & Death manages to bounce around a wide range of settings, from the urban reversal of a fatal police shooting in Courttia Newland’s Reversible, to the serial killer next door in Alexander MacLeod’s The Closing Date, to gossip in a Nigerian hairdressing salon in Petina Gappah’s The News of Her Death. It starts out very strongly with Robert Drewe’s thoughtful and poetic Dr. Pacific, and ends just as well with Kevin Barry’s Toronto and the State of Grace and Ali Smith’s Metaphysical - which I enjoyed immensely, despite being off maggots ever since Doctor Who and the Green Death in 1973 - and you might think from this that there would be a lot of filler sandwiched in between its 316 pages, but never was there any point at which I wanted to skip a few pages to the next story, nor a time when I stretched and yawned and put it down, picking up something more pulpy and easier to consume. That said, it being an anthology of terse tales, it’s easy to dip in and out of, or perfect for a longish bus or train journey, or a flight; or, like me, you could sit in a battered old Ikea chair, looking out through grimy unwashed windows onto a grey park on a soulless weekend afternoon, unable to sit at your writing desk because of the sudden and painful onset of sciatica, the subject matter causing you to think long and hard about what the hell you’re doing and how you got here. Sex and Death, four stars.

[Han Whiteoak · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the Reactor by Peter Hobbs was bizarre but compelling. I never did figure out why the narrator was looking after a fake nuclear power plant, or who the people were who communicated with him via email, but that didn't matter because I enjoyed his slightly odd personality so much.

Many of the stories were disturbing but very good, such as Evie, the story of a woman who undergoes a sudden personality shift, and Fortune Fish, where two former lovers meet at a party and look back at an incident they remember very differently. I thought Fixations was a very honest portrayal of how physical illness can distance an individual from the world. Porto Baso Scale Modellers was entertaining, although by that time I was getting a little tired of hypersexual female characters.

Overall, a fantastic collection.

[Ricky · Rating 4 out of 5]

George and Elizabeth - Ben Marcus
Fixations - Ceridwen Dovey
The Postcard - Wells Tower
Evie - Sarah Hall
The Days After Love - Yiyun Li
Where Hast Thou Been - Jon McGregor
Frank's Last Days - Guadalupe Nettel
Fin - Lynn Coady
The Closing Date - Alexander MacLeod
The Fortune Fish - Clare Wigfall

[Sarah Maguire · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of the stories are very good but, as is to be expected with so many contributing authors, it is a mixed bag. Still, if you were looking (which I wasn't) for a publication to tell you about the likely effects an anal fissure or a brain tumour on the libido, this is probably the book for you.

[Davidlodge82 · Rating 3 out of 5]

colección de relatos variopinta permite conocer otros autores menos conocidos en nuestra lengua. Sobretodo el libro tiene un punto de inflexión a partir de la mitad siendo los relatos más interesantes desde ese momento.

[el ♡ · Rating 2 out of 5]

it's....just not my cup of tea. it contains short stories but for me it's too much to cope. most of the time i can't really tell which is which. it got 1, 2 good stories but the rest of it is just....meh

[Christa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book! I loved all the stories and didn't want it to end. I have read it 3 times now! Recommended!

[Lora · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked a couple of the stories.

I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway.

[M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting collection of short stories. I won it in a contest and it was a good read.

[Elizabeth Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intriguing short story collection on two favorite themes.