Dark and dangerous, brilliantly unsettling and chillingly funny, this extraordinary debut shows us what we usually deny – the uneasy truce we make with our ruthless desires and gothic fears, and how easily it can be broken. Prize-winning author Chloe Wilson’s stories will pin you to the page.
The debut of an unforgettable new voice in Australian fiction, Hold Your Fire exposes the battles we wage beneath the surface.
The title story takes us into the cold war of a contemporary family: a missile-making mother doubts her husband’s guts and the steel of her son, until a playground incident escalates and brings them into the most surprising of alliances.
Needle-sharp, effortlessly surprising and beautifully controlled, every tale will pin you to the page. A young
couple move into a house in which there’s been a recent murder, and fall under the spell of their peculiar, commanding neighbours. Two sisters are determined to detoxify themselves into perfection. A diver pushes herself and those around her to higher and higher leaps. Interspersed with these are lightning strikes of
flash fiction: we glimpse a leopard in the apartment next door; plants grown out of a strange and miraculous soil;
the spirit of a girl who’s been thrown down a well.
At each turn, Chloe Wilson offers a unique insight, a tear in the veil of our moral certainties. Her stories strip away the varnish of our decency to reveal the raw mechanics beneath.
About the Author
Chloe Wilson’s work has appeared in Best Australian Poems, Award Winning Australian Writing, ELLE Australia, The Big Issue, The Southampton Review, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Book Review, Review of Australian Fiction, Cordite, Island, The Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin and Chicago Literati , among others. Her stories have been shortlisted for the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and ‘Tongue-Tied’ won the 2019 Iowa Review Fiction Prize, judged by Rebecca Makkai.
She is also the author of two poetry collections, The Mermaid Problem and Not Fox Nor Axe , which was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. Her poem “Soft Serve” recently won the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Chloe is a former Voiceworks Poetry Editor and holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne, where she currently lives.
Industry Reviews
'Whip smart, deliciously dark and wickedly funny, Wilson's stories are bursting with brash, unlikable characters, who favour scorching encounters and giving in to the surprising satisfactions of bad behaviour.'
