Wednesday's Child

Written over ten years, and many first published in magazines, these stories follow people who try to live ordinary lives until death, violence or estrangement breaks through. After her teenage son's suicide, a mother lists in a spreadsheet everyone she has known who has died. A professor drifts into an uneasy closeness with the woman who cuts her hair. Each year a restless woman hears by email from a man decades older who lives several states away. The lone survivor of a pact among schoolgirls to die together finds the dead girls weigh more on her life the longer they are gone. Mothers think about lost children, wives recall husbands long since estranged, and the stories weigh what remembering and forgetting are worth.

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About the book

Form

Short stories

First published

2023

Author's age

51 when first published

ISBN

9780374606374 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, United States)

9780008531867 (HarperCollins Publishers, United Kingdom)

9781250338389 (Picador, United States)

9780008531904 (Fourth Estate, United Kingdom)

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