Unpicking the stitches of gender and genre, the stories in this searing, funny, haunting debut explore how our ideas of womanhood shape us, and what they cost us.
‘My God darling—the women I know.’
A young woman tries to cheat her algorithm, creating a wholesome online persona while her ‘real’ life dissipates. A grandmother speaks to her granddaughter through the fog of generations. Two lovers divide over alternative meat options. A factory worker fits eyes in companion dolls until she is called on to install her own.
The women I know are sharp, absurd, sly, wrong, wry, repressed, hungry, horny, bold, envious, dominating, uncertain, overdetermined, underpaid, bored, smart, crystalizing, themselves.
A burning talent with growing international recognition, Katerina Gibson’s work has appeared in Granta, Kill Your Darlings, Overland and elsewhere. She is the Pacific regional winner of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and recipient of the Felix Meyer Scholarship.
‘Smart, gleeful, savage, funny and genuinely brilliant. I kept wanting to cry out with joy! Katerina Gibson is a superstar.’ Miles Allinson, author of In Moonland and Fever of Animals
'Women I Know is a rich, contemporary blend of inventive and entertaining writing. Dark and funny, Katerina Gibson’s stories are sparkling with ideas – it’s thrilling that the future of Australian fiction is held in such talented hands.' Ben Walter, author of What Fear Was
'Come for the bold conceits, stay for the savage disaffection. These mind-bending stories startle, surprise, beguile and devastate. Gibson’s talent, in striking out from the shores of realism, is to bring us closer to the truths of contemporary life.' Jo Lennan, author of In the Time of Foxes
‘[T]he 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.’ Georgia Brough, Books+Publishing
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'In Women I Know Gibson expertly blends genre-bending plots with complex undercurrents of feeling and reflection ... 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.'
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