Ruin : & other stories / Emma Hislop.

Fur -- Previous selves -- Housewarming -- Scare objects -- The game -- Mistaken -- Ruin -- A safe place -- Doctor ink -- Missing -- Shadow -- Red flags -- Sweet on the comedown.

Women and girls walk a perilously thin line between ruin and redemption in these stories as they try-with varying degrees of success-to outmanouver the violence that threatens to define their lives. There's the physical violence of men against their bodies-and sometimes the violence they exact in revenge. While doubts about a romantic partner, an abandonment by a sister, the fallout of a parent's pornography addiction, the betrayal of a friend, even the desire to touch a stranger's fur-like body are subtler aggressions that pack their own kinds of punches. Moving between contemporary New Zealand and London, and a dreamlike landscape that isn't quite real, this debut collection shimmers with a brutal kind of hope, exploring power and its contortions, powerlessness and its depravities, and the ends to which we will go to claim back agency