Objects Of Desire

A college freshman, flying home, strikes up an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the airplane. A long-lost stepbrother’s visit to New York prompts a reckoning with a family’s old taboos. An office worker, exhausted by the ambitions of the men around her, emerges into the gridlocked city one afternoon to make a decision. A wife, looking at her husband’s passwords neatly posted on the wall, realises there are no secrets left in their marriage.

In these stories, thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women’s lives - from the brink of adulthood, to the labyrinthine path between 20 and 30, to middle age, when certain possibilities quietly elapse. With powerful observation and mordant humour, Clare Sestanovich opens up a fictional world where intimate and uncomfortable truths lie hidden in plain sight.