The Secret Lives of Men - Softcover

'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.'

'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] 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.'

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

'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.'

In these thirteen short stories, Georgia Blain examines human nature in all its richness: our motivations, our desires and our shortcomings. The men in these tales frequently linger at the edges — their longings and failures exerting a subterranean pull on the women in their lives. In ‘The Secret Lives of Men’, a woman revisits her hometown and learns a long-held secret about her first boyfriend. In ‘The Bad Dog Park’, a man’s devotion to his dog ultimately forces him to confront his true hopes and fears. And in ‘The Other Side of the River’, we watch as a woman makes a snap decision about her life’s future direction, with devastating consequences for her family. Written in Blain’s trademark unadorned yet powerful prose, these stories resonate long after they are finished.

The Secret Lives of Men is an exceptional collection by one of Australia’s leading writers.