Objects of Desire
22 July 2021Synopsis
'Sestanovich’s elegant prose takes seriously the quiet unrest that can ravage a life' - Raven Leilani, author of Luster
A Best Book of the Summer in The Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly,Vogue, Esquire and Refinery29
A university student is flying home to visit her family when she strikes up an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the plane. A mother prepares for her son's wedding, her own life unravelling as his comes together. A long-lost stepbrother's visit prompts a family's reckoning with its old taboos.
In these eleven powerful stories, thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women’s lives – from the brink of adulthood, to the labyrinthine path between twenty and thirty, to middle age, when certain possibilities quietly lapse. Tender, lucid and piercingly funny, Objects of Desire is a collection pulsing with subtle drama, rich with unforgettable scenes, and alive with moments of recognition, each more startling than the last - a spellbinding debut that announces a major talent.
'A debut story collection of the rarest kind . . . you wish that every single entry could be an entire novel.' — Entertainment Weekly
Clare Sestanovich named one of The National Book Foundation's '5 under 35'.
Details
22 July 2021
9781529053562Reviews
Sestanovich’s elegant prose takes seriously the quiet unrest that can ravage a life, and makes room for the pleasure and discovery that can be found in that ruinRaven Leilani, author of Luster
Sublimely polished . . . collectively probe the gap between how we’re seen and how we might long to appear.Hephzibah Anderson, Observer
Sestanovich's steady hand and bone-clean prose recall such foremothers as Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and Jhumpa Lahiri Elinor Hitt, The Paris Review
Sestanovich is an extraordinary noticer. Carefully, sparely, she parses layers of feeling and attitude; of the tiny ways we admit or refuse love; of incremental, almost invisible, losses of selfGuardian
