Women I Know (Katerina Gibson, Scribner)

A solitary camper at a beach observes the families playing in the surf; a lonely woman laments her fractured relationship with her reclusive teenage son; a young marine biologist privately hired by a wealthy woman comes to realise her strange new position is as murky as the oceans she studies. These stories and more comprise Women I Know, the debut collection from prize-winning short fiction writer Katerina Gibson. In Women I Know Gibson expertly blends genre-bending plots with complex undercurrents of feeling and reflection. One of the book’s most startling, chilling and evocative stories, ‘Constellation in the Left Eye’, follows a young woman who paints the eyeballs of life-size dolls and one day realises she is painting her own reproduction—an unsettling premise which beautifully and subtly explores the male gaze. Indeed, the thread that connects the protagonists of these vastly different stories is the lived experiences shared by all women, complicated and disturbing as they often are. Read together, the pieces in Gibson’s fiction debut create an elegant and subtle whole, with delicate prose that moves the reader as expertly as it disturbs them. Readers of Krissy Kneen and Josephine Rowe will find Women I Know an engaging and nuanced collection.

Georgia Brough is a teacher, critic and writer.

Category: Reviews