Hold Your Fire Chloe Wilson by Chloe Wilson 9781761104879, 176110487X, B08L43CVVN instant download after payment.

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.

"Chilling, funny, and razor-sharp – a writer in control every step of the way. How I relished this extraordinary and original collection."   -  Sofie Laguna, author of The Eye Of The Sheep

First published in Granta Magazine, 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.

Interspersed with these transfixing tales 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 comfortable moral certainties. Her stories strip away the varnish of our decency to reveal the raw mechanics beneath. 

"These stories are wonderfully strange, complex yet funny; they are otherworldly and unearthly but at the same time an expression of how we live in the world right now. Chloe Wilson is the magician who by her art brings to light all we usually prefer to keep hidden."  -  Ceridwen Dovey, author of In the Garden of the Fugitives

Hold Your Fire exposes the battles we wage beneath the surface.