Listen Close to Me: Hidden Lives of Love, Madness, Murder, Loss and Deception(Salt Modern Fiction)

Subtitled Hidden Lives of Love, Madness, Murder, Loss and Deception, this new collection by Catherine Eisner traces often with darkest black humour the misadventures and behavioural tics of women driven by bizarre and sometimes criminal compulsions. An asexual niece becomes the love interest of her erotica-collecting uncle; the mistress of an army Intelligence Officer assumes the modus operandi of a spy to outwit her lover; a cat-obsessed wife of a commodities broker is suckered into a human-trafficking scam in Hong Kong; an eighteen-year-old governess becomes a suspect in a notorious case of serial murder and begins to harbour suspicions about the budding sociopath in her charge, a sinister nine-year-old boy. These are tales that probe the intimate lives and crimes of unreliable narrators to prompt disturbing confidences told in voices from the sidelines that we wouldn’t normally hear. ‘Extraordinary writing. Mesmeric reading.’ Ambit magazine.

Table of Contents:
Foreword Lovesong in Invisible Ink The Shadow on the Blind An Unreined Mind—Part 1 An Unreined Mind—Part 2 Listen Close to Me Graphological Notes on the Script of Characters in the Texts Acknowledgements

About the Author :
Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Eisner has ‘mastered the twist in the tale and her stories cascade vividly into derangement’ affirms a national review crisply, an insight endorsed by a reviewer stimulated by ‘startlingly inventive and genre-busting tales.’

Review :
I've long been an admirer of Catherine Eisner's piquant and highly original fictions in the literary journal, 'Ambit', and of her singularly rich pictorial and sensuous prose (she's an academically trained painter, I understand). Here at last she is given a very much broader canvas for her character studies of women at the end of their tether, though it's the minute detail of their dysfunctional, drug-dependant (and even criminal) lives I admire so much. entertaining and finely spiced … Extraordinary writing. Mesmeric reading.