Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction

Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction is Alison MacLeod’s collection of highly charged short stories.

Sexy, tender, funny and haunting by turns, the stories in Alison MacLeod’s daring collection are tales of lovers, would-be lovers and lovers gone wrong. Here we discover ECT patient Gloria, who falls for her anaesthetist, ‘Dr Numb’; the cerebral Nick, who chases after the heavily pregnant Katie at an Ikea sale; and the legendary lovers Heloise and Abelard re-imagined for the twenty-first century. With settings that range from a cheap Paris cafe to London’s Hayward Gallery, and from the Brighton seafront to the Nova Scotia coast, these stories are at times magical, at times grittily real, but always affecting.

‘Alison MacLeod is a strikingly original voice. Her stories create intimate worlds and make the reader live in them with an intensity which is haunting, disturbing and above all beguiling’ Helen Dunmore

‘Alison MacLeod’s collection of stories is a baker’s dozen of excellence book-ended by brilliance’ Time Out

‘Fragmentary evocations of desire and its mysteries, passing glimpses into minds and hearts: tender; pierced; translucent’ Guardian

‘Beautifully crafted, they range from brilliantly observed humour to the haunting and heart-rending. Immensely readable’ Big Issue

Alison MacLeod was raised in Canada and has lived in England since 1987. She is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels and Unexploded, and of a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. Unexploded was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2013. Alison MacLeod is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Chichester University and lives in Brighton.