In a magnetic follow-up to Winter Animals, Ashani Lewis takes a delightfully candid approach to facets of desire and loneliness, cut through with breath-taking lyricism. Lewis’ debut short story collection creates a stark world of fleeting infatuations, violent compulsions, unexpected solace and the sombre ghost of memories. A dying woman dedicates her life to Antarctic ice; a romance ends with an imitation oyster; a man believes the mother of his child has become a witch; the potential success of a marriage is indistinguishable from a couple’s hike of Everest – in these striking stories, Lewis takes a kaleidoscopic, unforgiving look at love: its obsessions, its grotesque demands and the distance it creates between us.
