Birthday
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Laine looks at the attractive man sitting across from her and can’t decide: does she like his forwardness or not? But she’s been single for so long, maybe it’s worth trying again. Her husband left over ten years ago, and she hasn’t really dated since . . . If this one doesn’t work out either, then she’ll keep living like she has been—but if it does work out? Severīns notices her lingering stare, and his lips once again stretch out at the corners. It must really be his smile, then. She likes it better when he doesn’t smile.”
Eight stories, eight women, an emotional multitude. In her short-story collection, Birthday, Jana Egle distinctly straps the male presence into the back seat and lets the female voice ring free. Not to be taken as “a book for women” or “women's literature,” the themes and situations in Birthday present a familiar, yet uneasy, vantage point for any reader, regardless of personal, real-life experience.
A design-firm employee who finds herself dating a potential sociopath, a woman suffering a terrible loss and having to find the strength to ask for help, the navigation of a mental health crisis, the fears of old age, revisitng a past love—Egle explores these universal themes, and more, with a scalding, narrative realism that leaves your skin crawling and your mind begging for more.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Strange and macabre events animate the stories in this exquisite English-language debut from Egle. In "The Debt," a pregnant mother of five attempts to calm herself after opening a threatening debt collection letter by tending to domestic tasks at her house in the forest. The story's tragic arc is foreshadowed by the arrival of a small bird, which stares at her creepily from a windowsill. "The Duck" quickly swerves from a lighthearted romp about an office romance to a harrowing story of a stalker. The title character in "Aleksandra Is Beautiful" makes regular visits to her local library in her wheelchair, where she has a series of increasingly fraught interactions with a librarian who finds her attractive. In the remarkable and tense "Runaway Train," a young woman returns home to celebrate the birthday of her younger brother, whose childhood room their alcoholic parents have kept as a shrine since he went missing years earlier. Egle blends realistic depictions of her windswept northern settings with a subtly off-kilter vibe, creating an unsettling effect. Readers will hope for more from Egle.
