She Is Haunted
Paige Clark

With remarkable grace and an assured style, She Is Haunted masterfully grapples with charged mother-daughter dynamics, grief, exes, and the complexities of friendship in a debut collection of stories that range from competitive call centers to Chinatown restaurants. A ballerina nurses an injured leg and struggles to learn Cantonese while her husband dances on an international tour of Don Quixote with a new female lead; a mother cuts her daughter's hair because her own hair begins falling out; a woman undergoes brain surgery in order to live more comfortably in higher temperatures; a woman attempts to physically transform into her husband so that she does not have to grieve. Praised as the "strongest fiction debut" of the year in the Sydney Morning Herald and shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, the stories collected in She Is Haunted deal with transnational Asian identity and intergenerational trauma with an unforgettable voice and exuberant wit that mark Paige Clark as an entrancing new literary talent.