The Carnal Fugues joins four other brilliant Australian books on the shortlist for this year’s prestigious PRIME MINISTER’S LITERARY AWARDS in the fiction category. An unbelievable feat and an achievement for short story writers! The judges had this to say: The sentences in The Carnal Fugues are darkly brilliant, biting, vital, comic. They flash along, discharging an energy that is full of sex and savagery. Different people from different places are all captured in these same currents of desire, laid bare to their own bodies, their sensual minds.

The sentences make up longer stories – intricately structured, narratively complex – as well as micro-stories less than a page long; these are very different difficulties, and Catherine McNamara surmounts them both with skill. What is most delicious in these stories is the element of surprise: at no moment as a reader can we be sure where we’re being taken; at no moment do we feel we’re in anything but masterly hands.

Gathered over a decade of writing, Catherine McNamara’s short stories in The Carnal Fugues are a repository of energy and eros that should power writers and readers for generations to come.