Objects of Desire

A college freshman, flying home, strikes up an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the airplane. A long-lost stepbrother's visit to New York prompts a reckoning with a family's old taboos. An office worker, exhausted by the ambitions of the men around her, emerges into the gridlocked city one afternoon to make a decision. A wife, looking at her husband's passwords neatly posted on the wall, realizes there are no secrets left in their marriage.In these stories, thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women's lives-from the brink of adulthood, to the labyrinthine path between twenty and thirty, to middle age, when certain possibilities quietly elapse. With elegant precision, powerful observation, and mordant humor, Clare Sestanovich brings us a fictional world remarkably true to life, where uncomfortable truths are hidden in plain sight. Objects of Desire pulses with subtle drama and with unforgettable moments of recognition-a spellbinding, brilliant debut.