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, realizes there are no secrets left in their marriage.

In these eleven short 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 elapse. With powerful observation and mordant humour, Clare Sestanovich opens up a fictional world where intimate and uncomfortable truths lie hidden in plain sight.
Enjoyed these 11 short stories ⭐️⭐️⭐️

2.5 rounded up

I'd spotted this on early lists of books to look forward to in 2021 in various places online, so was really looking forward to giving it a go.

It's always tricky to review a collection of short stories when you really enjoyed the first and last stories (By Design and Separation) which include some great lines but felt pretty ambivalent about all the ones in between. Then how best to describe Clare Sestanovich's debut? Her writing focuses on the interior worlds of women: principally women's desire and personal relationships. I finished a fair few of the stories wondering if I'd truly 'got' them, and while they all have something to say on the themes I've mentioned they definitely don't all conclude in a clear or satisfactory manner - perhaps I just like my short stories to be a bit more clear-cut and traditionally written than these were.

Objects of Desire is a deftly written collection of stories centering on women's lives. An enjoyable reading experience and I would like to read a full novel from this author.

This was a bit of an odd one for me. I enjoyed the ambiance of these stories and how evocative they could be, but felt rather ambivalent about the stories themselves. ⁣
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This collection about desire in its many forms contains moments of lucid insight into the senseless but meaningful things we do, how little we understand about ourselves, and the things we crave from each other. The book tries to capture the incoherence of life - how many things sometimes don’t add up to very much, and how little things can mean the world. In the process of doing so without succumbing to the surreal however, the stories became narratively weak and rather unmemorable, and often just petered out. ⁣It’s rather a pity because it is well written and I felt I should like the stories which all had interesting premises (a middle aged woman prepares for her son’s wedding and considers the sexual harassment case against her, the wife and young mistress of the same man wonder about each other, a college student is impregnated by her virgin boyfriend and encounters him again years later), but something didn’t quite click for me and I can’t fully articulate why.
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#ObjectsofDesire