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Stories
by Josephine Rowe
The stories in Here Until August follow the fates of characters who, by choice or by force, are traveling beyond the boundaries of their known worlds.
These are people who move with the seasons. We meet them negotiating reluctant or cowardly departures, navigating uncertain returns, or biding the disquieting calm that so often precedes moments of decisive action.
In one story, an agoraphobic French émigré compulsively watches disturbing footage from the other side of the world as she attempts to keep a dog named Chavez out of trouble. In another, a young couple weather the interiority of a Montreal winter, more attuned to the illicit goings-on of their neighbors than to their own hazy, unfolding futures. Other stories play out against the fictional counterparts of iconic Australian and American locales, places that are recognizable but set just beyond the brink of familiarity: flooded townships and distant islands, sunlit woodlands or paths made bright by ice, places of unpredictable access and spaces scrubbed from maps.
From the Catskills to New South Wales, from the remote and abandoned island outports of Newfoundland to the sprawl of a North American metropolis, these transformative stories show how the places where we choose to live our lives can just as easily turn us inward as outward.
"Rowe is a writer of great subtlety, and what could, in lesser hands, be quiet stories from familiar emotional landscapes become revelatory here...Pitch-perfect examinations of place and psyche from a writer to watch closely." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"While the characters' predicaments are often familiar, Rowe's fiercely idiosyncratic ways of describing scenes will seize and hold the reader's attention. The disorienting, sometimes fragmented prose mirrors the characters' sense of ongoing loss and will linger with readers." - Publishers Weekly
"Here Until August tracks the shimmer of precarious moments and transient moods with devastating precision. In their steady excavation of intimacy, these spacious stories bring Alice Munro to mind. I underlined sentence after sentence as I read: for their beauty, their clarity, and their wisdom. Josephine Rowe is a breathtakingly good writer, and this is a marvelous book." - Michelle de Kretser
"Eavesdrop on neighbors, spend some time in the Catskills, and meet a dog named Chavez in Josephine Rowe's new short story collection. In beautiful prose, she takes you to places you might think you know, and leaves you there to find your way out." – Katie Yee, Literary Hub
"Here Until August is extraordinary. Each of these stories delivers a fully, richly textured world: images that immerse, loss and longing and love and melancholy that suffuse the page, characters who live, and sentence after sentence that astonishes. A stunner of a book." - Clare Beams, author of We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories
This information about Here Until August was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Josephine Rowe was born in 1984 in Rockhampton, Australia, and grew up in Melbourne. In the United States her writing has appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Iowa Review, The Paris Review Daily, and other publications. She holds fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Program in fiction at Stanford University, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the Omi International Arts Center, and Yaddo. In 2016, her fiction won the Elizabeth Jolley Prize in Australia. She currently lives in Tasmania.
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