Cirrus@Austlit

'Dark and dangerous, brilliantly unsettling and chillingly funny, this extraordinary debut shows us what we usually deny – the uneasy truce we make with our ruthless desires and gothic fears, and how easily it can be broken. Prize-winning author Chloe Wilson’s stories will pin you to the page.

'First published in Granta Magazine, the title story takes us into the cold war of a contemporary family: a missile-making mother doubts her husband’s guts and the steel of her son, until a playground incident escalates and brings them into the most surprising of alliances.

'Needle sharp, effortlessly surprising and beautifully controlled, every story is transfixing. 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 higher and higher jumps.

'Interspersed with these transfixing tales 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. At each turn, Chloe Wilson offers a unique insight, a tear in the veil of our comfortable moral certainties.

'Hold Your Fire exposes the battles we wage beneath the surface.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'At first, David McCooey’s Star Struck appears to be a collection comprising four sections, each self-contained and corralled from the others. These sections range from a series of lyric poems meditating on a ‘cardiac event’, to poems investigating light and dark, a sequence of eighteen ‘pastorals’ on pop stardom (and fandom) and, finally, two longer narrative poems. A quotation at the beginning of the pastoral sequence seems to hint at the collection’s attitude. From William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral, it reads: ‘Probably the cases I take are the surprising rather than the normal ones, and once started on an example I follow it without regard to the unity of the book.’ (Introduction)