The Secret Lives of Men - Softcover

'Subtle, beautifully paced stories ... a finely tuned collection, thoughtfully written and arranged, with profound and unsettling things to say about love, loneliness, and risk.'

'A haunting, unsentimental exploration of the vexations and joys of modern life, family, love and desire.'

'Told with subtlety, tenderness and skill, The Secret Lives of Men displays Georgia Blain's superb ability to convey both the joys and struggles of daily life and its impact on each of us. Blain is a gifted writer: through her storytelling we come to know ourselves better.'

'Blain's style is refreshingly lean and plain but all her stories are rich with digressions, pregnant gaps, suggestions of further dimensions that beg to be explored'

'There's a quiet, understated quality to her prose, an introspection in her narrative that makes her words glow dully with slow-burning intensity ... Relationships in all their combinations and permutations are skilfully dissected by an author with a keen eye and a firm grasp.'

'It is the mark of a superior book of short stories when each contribution is able to stand in its own bold outline, yet also go to make something more and whole. This is such a book ... It is a mature work from an author with a special sensibility and a comprehending, humane outlook.'

'[A] skilled, disenchanted reckoning of the way we live now.'

'Blain's achievement with the short story form is to render it a mid point between the overt artifice of fiction and the covert artifice of life-writing ... her stories fill up with ambiguity ... characterised by an irresolution that mimics the resistance of experience to shape and comprehension.'

'Richly imagined characters ... told with lovely restraint. The authenticity of the writing is such that you feel you are standing in the shoes of these characters whose lives are at a particularly intense point'

'Many adjectives have been used to describe Georgia Blain's work, including evocative, powerful, atmospheric, haunting, rich, thought-provoking, skilful, uncompromising and finely detailed -- all of which apply to this collection of short stories.'

Georgia Blain is the author of a memoir, essays, short stories, and the novels Closed for Winter, Strange Times, Too Close to Home, and Darkwater, her first young-adult book. She has been short-listed for numerous awards, including the NSW and SA premier's literary awards and the Nita B. Kibble Award.