The Carnal Fugues Launch with Catherine McNamara

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

The Carnal Fugues is a wayward, wanton selection of 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…