Longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize 2020
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.