The Book of Reasonable Women: stories

The women in these stories are at all times, through their many varied emotions, entirely reasonable... at least to themselves. They each do what they need to do and believe what they need to believe. They are trustful, loyal, and believing, but also heedless, rash, and detached. They fall in and out of love, they suffer and overcome loss and, when things go wrong, they simply start again. Their experiences make them resilient, unfazed, practical, but also demanding, persistent, determined. Would they lie to you, conjure up ghosts, steal your lover, put a spell on you? Probably. Yes.

The Book of Reasonable Women is a collection of thirty contemporary short stories, exploring themes of assimilation, identity, ethnicity, accountability, self-reliance, remembering, and entirely purposeful forgetting. It illustrates both with humour and compassion the remarkable reasonableness of women.