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From award-winning Australian author Chloe Wilson comes Hold Your Fire , a debut short story collection that will haunt you long after you turn the page. A steely mother doubts her husband’s guts and her son''s capability, until a playground incident dramatically escalates. A young couple move into a house in which there’s been a recent murder, and fall under the spell of their peculiar, commanding neighbours. Two sisters are determined to detoxify themselves into perfection. A diver pushes herself and those around her to dangerous heights. Interspersed with these stories are lightning strikes of flash fiction: we glimpse a leopard in the apartment next door; plants grown out of a strange and miraculous soil; the spirit of a girl who’s been thrown down a well. Needle-sharp, effortlessly surprising and beautifully controlled, Hold Your Fire is a debut collection that introduces a fierce new talent. At each turn, Chloe Wilson offers a unique insight, a tear in the veil of our moral certainties. Her stories strip away the varnish of our decency to reveal the raw, fascinating truth beneath.
About the author
Chloe Wilson is the author of the short story collection Hold Your Fire and two poetry collections, The Mermaid Problem and Not Fox Nor Axe, which was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Iowa Review, Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, ELLE Australia, The Big Issue, and Australian Book Review, among others. Her stories have won the Iowa Review Fiction Prize and been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Chloe is a former Voiceworks Poetry Editor and holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne.
