Shortlisted: 2019 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize for ‘Supermarket Love’
Elleke Boehmer’s thrilling new collection of stories tracks lives across continents from the perspective of the southern hemisphere—its light, its seas, its sensibilities. Here people are caught up in a world that tilts seductively, sometimes dangerously, between south and north, between ambition and tradition. An African student in England longs for her desert home; a shy Argentinian travel agent agonizes about joining her boyfriend in New York; a soldier is pursued by his past.
Sharp, tender, and always arresting, these stories crackle with luminous insights as characters struggle to come to terms—with their pasts, with one another, and with themselves.
Arresting, intriguing, and brilliantly crafted, these stories explore the psychic wounds of our rapidly contracting contemporary world, with its complications of race, migration and trauma. Each unfolds with impeccable pacing, and gradually unveils a deeply humane sense of the world.
—Kwame Dawes
Compassionate, intelligent and evocative: this is a morally serious writing, lucidly rendered.
—Gail Jones
These assured, accomplished stories are reports from a world in which unacknowledged dark energies undermine and render hollow our bright, rational self-understanding. With passion and intelligence, and rare moral insight, Elleke Boehmer traces the scars left on the psyche by the tortuous histories of the South.
—J. M. Coetzee
This collection isn’t just about geographical travel, it is very much concerned with our journey through life, how we interact with others and how those relationships change through our daily experiences and expectations. […] It is a collection about fine lines, and how they shift constantly throughout our lives. […] It delivers thoughts on how we create relationships and what we take away from them. Boehmer continually poses that age old question; Do we take and give in equal measure?
