The Carnal Fugues is a wayward, wanton selection of short and shorter 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. Are we an unthinking species, condemned to misunderstand one another? Or do our near misses amount to valid templates for modern existence? There is diseased love, frugal love, contorted love, where the inroads of the past – and convention – colour and confine us; there is the love of life in the face of death, and the persistence of our carnal compulsions.

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. In London, a Roman man happens upon a woman from the past, bringing back a passionate interlude he has hidden from himself. Destructive lovers interview a renowned musician in dusty Bamako. Retirees from Paris visit a laden property in the south of France, and an untamed Greek island brings a widow back to the ebb of life.

**CURRENTLY SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIME MINISTER’S LITERARY AWARDS **

Judge’s comments: 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.

The sentences make up longer stories – intricately structured, narratively complex – as well as micro-stories less than a page long; these are very different difficulties, and Catherine McNamara surmounts them both with skill. What is most delicious in these stories is the element of surprise: at no moment as a reader can we be sure where we’re being taken; at no moment do we feel we’re in anything but masterly hands.

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.

* * * * *

McNamara writes in arresting prose and uses vivid descriptive detail: an old, decrepit man has ‘towed his own body for years now’; another, younger more cocksure man, seems to his aunt to be glowing with a ‘strategic, masculine beauty’. 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 (McNamara has lived and worked in France and West Africa, and currently runs a writing retreat in Italy.) A serious reader disregards cover comments, no matter how glowing or prestigious, but Hilary Mantel’s endorsement of McNamara’s stories is thoroughly apt.

Debra Adelaide, Australian Book Review Issue 463

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 has lived a peripatetic life, from a writer’s garret in bohemian Paris to running a bar in West Africa, and her stories reward the reader with a cosmopolitan vantage. You’ll find such exotic scenarios as a Japanese soprano resting her voice on a sailing boat in Corsica, or a South African ad exec insinuating themselves into a regional office in Accra, Ghana. And McNamara’s unconstrained imagination is let loose across people and landscapes, around Hong Kong and Athens and Johannesburg, to roam over the critique of an award-winning writer entombed by privilege, or to follow a brother returning to Sydney with an Ethiopian bride in tow. 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, Spectrum, Sydney Morning Herald

Fine stories, rank with exotic air, bursting like old fruit.

Bruce Pascoe

Strange, often unsettling, McNamara’s stories depict multiple countries, characters and cultures in wry and challenging ways. If they share anything, it’s the knowledge that each of us can be undone in a heartbeat.

Susan Johnson

People live precariously between worlds, slip into crevasses; they are often dangling, waiting. There is danger and loss, often across cultural and linguist gaps. And there is love, unfurling. McNamara shows how, among our thick, noisy, sticky lives there is, sometimes,  'cohesion among the rubble'.

Michelle Elvy, Flash Frontier Editor, Managing Editor Best Small Fictions

A sumptuous collection. Each story reveals, with unflinching clarity, McNamara’s piercing observations of life and its possibilities.

Joanna Atherfold Finn

** WINNER BEST SHORT STORY COLLECTION SABOTEUR AWARDS 2021 **

‘As Simple as Water’, ‘The Woman Whose Husband was Killed in a Climbing Accident’, Wigleaf Top 50 2017 Longlist

The thirty-three flash fictions of Love Stories for Hectic People explore the alignment of beings that is love.

There is love that is vulgar, love that knows no reason; there is love that cradles the act of living, love that springs through the cracks; love that is slaughtered. These tales take place from Italy to Ghana to Greece and London and Tokyo, in grainy cities and muted hotel rooms; there is a Mafia murder, an ambulance rescue worker and a woman whose husband falls off a mountain. There is unchaste attraction and slippery, nuanced love; police violence and porn, and fishing too.

Like a raconteur in a lamplit Venetian bar, McNamara understands the charm and architecture of a tale. These structurally compressed fictions still cover significant ground as one consequence topples like a domino into the next, and conflicts modulate between forms. Love Stories for Hectic People is that rare thing - a book that gets better with each re-reading.

Michael Loveday

Seductive love, evaporating love and sometimes 'increasingly superb' love: it's all in these pages. Sharp, witty and deeply real, these small stories reveal moments of connections, and sometimes dissolution.

Michelle Elvy

Catherine McNamara is one of the best writers I've read in all the time I've been in publishing. She can do more in two-hundred words than most writers can do in two-hundred pages. By turns real, funny, dark, magic, ugly, and beautiful. This collection rocks.

Christopher James, Jellyfish Review

This collection drifts across continents and cultures, slowly unbuttoning aspects of relationships between an eclectic cast of characters. 

K.M. Elkes

Catherine McNamara’s small, succulent stories show us that love has ‘urges belonging to a wider carnal history’. In these stories, you can taste this love, feel its texture, touch its skin, smell its odour and see its shimmer as it deals with absence, infidelity, danger and death.

Abha Iyengar

A touching and contemporary collection from a gifted storyteller.

Eric Akoto, Edito- in-Chief Litro UK & USA

A maestro of the flash form, each word lands on the page with surgical precision and we are at once transported to a sensuous realm of intimacy and desire.

Lana Citron

Catherine McNamara is proficient in the language of sensuality, at drawing into relief all that is tacit within matters of the heart. Stories which glint with loss and allure, with touch and toxicity, from deep within the shadowlands of intimacy where certainty no longer lives.

Rachael Smart

I rarely receive a review copy, sit right down and read most of it in one sitting. Catherine McNamara’s Love Stories for Hectic People had me doing that. It’s a beguiling collection of flash fiction - the author’s third - that’s as briskly inventive and various as the form demands, embracing sensuality and ugliness in equal measure, and darting from one international encounter to another (it starts in an airport). Love lies at the heart of the matter, each time round, but grief and brutality are there too. ‘The quixotic animals and wise elders with spectacularly gnarled toes..’

Michael Caines, Brixton Review of Books

There’s nothing I’ve read this year - not long, not short, not poetic, not practical, not famous, not secret - that has given me more pleasure than Love Stories for Hectic People by @catinitaly

Andrew Boulton @Boultini

Finalist, People’s Book Prize 2019-2020 (UK)

** WINNER GRAND PRIZE ** Eyelands International Book Awards 2018 (Greece)

Best of 2018 Books, The Literary Sofa (UK)

Books of the Year 2018, The Lonely Crowd (UK)

‘Pia Tortora’ – Finalist, Royal Academy/Pin Drop Award

‘The Wild Beasts of the Earth Will Adore Him’ – Finalist, Kingston Writing School/Hilary Mantel International Short Story Competition

‘Adieu, Mon Doux Rivage’, Finalist, Short Fiction Prize

‘The Cliffs of Bandiagara’, Finalist, International Willesden Herald Short Story Prize

‘Magaly Park’, Pushcart nomination, Labello Press

‘Enfolded’, Finalist, Love on the Road Competition, Liberties Press

‘The Kingdom of Fassa’, Story of the Month, Seren Press

‘They Came from the East’, First Prize Flash Fiction Competition TSS

A collection of twenty award-winning short stories that explore the beckoning terrain of the body, the alluring otherness of place.

 A Japanese soprano sets sail for arid, haunted Corsica where she seeks her lost voice. A nude woman at the window of a Hong Kong hotel watches her lover dine in an adjacent building, but is her desire faltering? With a young son and her photographer partner, a journalist traverses sparse, mystical Mali to interview an irascible musician. A son relives his mother’s last hours before a hiking accident in the Italian Dolomites, while in London a grieving family takes in an ex-soldier from the Balkan wars, unaware of the man’s demons.

 The Cartography of Others takes us from fumy Accra to suburban Sydney, from scruffy Paris to pre-fundamentalist Mali. Each bewitchingly recounted story conveys a location as vital as the fitful, contemplative characters themselves. Lives are mapped, unpicked, crafted.

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

Catherine McNamara's haunting stories map landmarks of psychological encounter. Hers is an international canvas, marking the points where contemporary lives cross with sensuality and finesse. Beautiful work.

Cathy Galvin

 An enchanting smorgasbord of addictive stories. These beautifully sensual tales linger. Catherine McNamara’s writing is vital and insightful.

Irenosen Okojie

McNamara does things with words (most) other writers cannot. Her stories are sensual and assured. Not a writer to be ignored.

Tom Vowler 

Catherine McNamara's writing is superb, this latest collection presents a unique way to talk about displacement and sensuality.

Eric Akoto, Editor-in-Chief, Litro Magazine, UK & USA

 A master of mood and atmosphere, Catherine McNamara has a keen eye for the startling image that so often holds the heart of a story – a blue tent the morning after a party, a naked woman spreading herself across a window high above Hong Kong. Her theme is desire - its ambiguities, betrayals, bruises, and joys - and this is fearless, sensuous writing. Her prose is meticulous, the stories rich with insight and empathy. Highly recommended.

Annemarie Neary

There is a savage wildness to McNamara’s The Cartography of Others, no matter the exotic location or how civilized her characters appear to be. A seething primal undercurrent that is both sensuous and violent runs through her language, generating little shocks in the reader. These shocks are delicious. There is a hidden delicatessen of shocks in these short stories, offering portions designed to keep us sated but hungry for more.

Haley Jenkins, Selcouth Station 

The backdrops are real and effectively drawn but it is in charting the contours of the human condition that McNamara succeeds with skilful interpretation. McNamara has a proclivity in taking readers to the wrong side of town, where dialogue is often snared by cultural and societal division. She seems not to consider our differences so easily erased. The concept of “foreign” is impressed as a real entity in a seemingly shrinking world.

The Cartography of Others.. is an atlas of distances and bridges between us.

David Stewart, Litro UK

These are beautifully constructed stories, the language lyrical and poetic yet still authentic and real.

Tracy Fells, The Literary Pig Blog

The Cartography of Others – a quite brilliant collection of short stories

Trip Fiction

Such beauty and tragedies have coursed through my veins on my journey in this book.

Alison Cook, Reader Goodreads

Semi-Finalist, Hudson Prize (USA)

Longlisted, Frank O’Connor Short Story Award 2014 (Ireland)

Lust and dirt from a world of places.

Two foolhardy snowboarders challenge the savagery of mountain weather in the Dolomites. A Ghanaian woman strokes across a hotel pool in the tropics, flaunting her pregnant belly before her lover’s discarded wife. A sex-worker is enlisted to care for her Italian lover’s elderly parents. And in Berlin, a woman visits her brother and his partner for the very last time. Pelt and Other Stories lingers on the cusp between Europe and Africa, between ancient sentiments and modern disquiet.

Every story in this collection is a delightful surprise. McNamara’s lucid prose shines on every page, creating stories that are both difficult to put down, and unforgettable.

Chika Unigwe

I opened the book and found myself lost within an in-depth exploration of humankind that didn’t sweeten the reality of the world, but instead showed the true nature of humans.

Sabotage Reviews

I read Catherine McNamara’s work once, twice, then tree times and it gets even better with each read. Her words are deft and swift, yet have such weight.

Rosa Rankin-Gee

Her prose is at once lyrical and staccato, not distracted so much as ambitious – constantly moving forward.

Her Royal Majesty Review, Paris