Product Description
- SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 PRIME MINISTER’S LITERARY AWARDS
A wayward, wanton selection of stories grounded in displacement, desire, and the wish coursing through us to accede to the state of love. There is torment and illness, crude reality and distant fragrant places, peopled by characters that reside close to our bones, our psyches, our flesh. A Japanese soprano has lost her voice and seeks repose on a sailing boat in Corsica. A South African advertising executive learns the ropes at his Accra office. Destructive lovers interview a renowned musician in dusty Bamako. Lovers meet, fade, delude. We are weak and defiant beings, ever-learning, ever-lustful.
“Fine stories, rank with exotic air, bursting like old fruit.” – Bruce Pascoe
“McNamara’s work has a fierce, vital beat, her stories robust yet finely worked, her voice striking in its confidence and originality. She writes with sensuous precision and a craft that is equally precise. This is fiction that can stand up in any company.” – Hilary Mantel
REVIEWS
“The Carnal Fugues is a globetrotting anthology of short fiction, a collection of greatest hits from Catherine McNamara that sketches shadow-lines of desire and connection on an international canvas… McNamara’s prose is often fierce and finely wrought; her emotional intelligence and cultural curiosity are matched by a lively, experimental approach (some of these offerings verge on microfiction) to the short form.” – CAMERON WOODHEAD AND STEVE CARROLL, The Sydney Morning Herald
“…her stories are undeniably striking…Intriguing and cosmopolitan, her stories are infused with historical weight and a worldly wisdom suggestive of timeless, even epic, narrative. They also reflect a keenly observant, well-travelled life.” – DEBRA ADELAIDE, Australian Book Review (paywalled)
“The sentences in The Carnal Fugues are darkly brilliant, biting, vital, comic. They flash along, discharging an energy that is full of sex and savagery. Different people from different places are all captured in these same currents of desire, laid bare to their own bodies, their sensual minds. Gathered over a decade of writing, Catherine McNamara’s short stories in The Carnal Fugues are a repository of energy and eros that should power writers and readers for generations to come.” JUDGE’S COMMENT, 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards
