Objects of Desire
Clare Sestanovich
22 July 2021
9781529053562Synopsis
'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'.
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 LahiriElinor Hitt, The Paris Review
