Six interconnected stories of love, loss, and betrayal — where memory and desire collide, and the past is never truly past.
In his dazzling new collection, Israeli-Australian author Ben Sharafski uncovers the hidden dramas of everyday life with striking insight and poignancy. His characters navigate landscapes alive with memory, desire, and quiet deception. Love affairs ignite and fade, family histories emerge in tantalising fragments, and the past casts a long shadow over the present. Evocative and charged with an almost forensic emotional honesty, Returning to Carthage explores the fragile bargains we make — with each other, with history, and with ourselves.
"Excellent! Desperately sad" - Les Murray (on Two Lives, Intersected)
"Filled with an almost tactile sense of place" - Natasha Watson
"A remarkable achievement" - Fergus McDermott
"A cryptic look at relationships and the struggle between compromise and temptation" - Sujoya Mukherjee
"I could not put this final story down and read until 3am" - Mark Porton
"Absolutely mesmerising" - John Gilbert
"Don't you just love it when you take a chance on a new writer, and the reward is way beyond your expectations?" - Andrea Johnson
"Inventive but still grounded in the real and burdensome. Sharafski masterly constructs moments and movements of self-awareness that grapple with the human condition within us and throughout history" - Mary Goldman
"These interlocking bittersweet stories are beautifully written, and I was surprised at how instantly I became immersed in the world of each story" - Marnie Fleming Ross
"What a beautiful collection of stories taking you through all the stages of life. I liked each one more than the last. What a lovely and emotional journey" - Dana De Silva
"The writing is simply terrific. I was hooked on his style" - Nilton Teixeira
"A beautiful tapestry of love, loss, guilt and the whole spectrum of human emotions. Bravo!" - Karine Van der Elst
"Sharafski's writing really pulls you in" - Emma Ricci
"This story elicited from me the very rare misty-eyed reading" - Wes Allen
"Sharafski's narrator moves back and forth between the past and the present and between history and current life, tying together all the threads that bind us with each other and with our pasts" - Jenny Lewis
"Such an engaging cycle of short stories... an almost cinematic quality" - Terry Wheeler
"The author really captured death in a way I have not seen written yet. By the last sentence I was in tears" - Jennie Damron
"It is refreshing to come across the work of someone so utterly devoted to their craft as Sharafski is" - Chantel Lora
"Complex yet beautiful narrative" - Aung Kyi San
"A revelation not easily rendered. You simply must experience it for yourself" - Kirsten Harris
Cover artwork by Onkar Lele
https://www.behance.net/whoisonkar#
