Stories full of people reaching for one another with the wrong hands.

July's world here is full of neighbours, lovers, children, strangers, performers, employees, women half-inventing themselves in real time. A shared patio, a swimming lesson, a job, a crush, a small confession — July takes minor social moments and lets them swell until they become almost mythic in their awkwardness. July’s characters are often needy, theatrical, horny, frightened, sincere, and slightly unbearable, which is to say: recognisable. Her sentences move with a peculiar flat brightness, making emotional exposure feel both comic and dangerous.

Winner of the 2007 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, this is the book that established July’s fiction: intimate, odd, sexually uneasy, and very good at the kind of loneliness in a way that makes you feel less alone. 

Paperback edition published by Text Publishing in 2007; this copy is a 2008 reprint. First published in the US by Scribner in 2007. Light general shelfwear and handling to covers, with some corner/edge wear visible; pages clean and binding sound.