This is What it Feels Like
A woman recedes in her kitchen when her adult adopted son shows up on the street. A daughter furtively watches as her mother finds bliss. Memories assemble, then unravel. Women love and are loved, are betrayed and betray, choose to stay, sometimes riddled with indecision, and leave—wondering if they should cut the ivy before they go.
The fox traces a spectral presence—vanishing, returning, delivering messages, wreaking carnage, inspiring love and heralding transformation. Recurring images converge and diverge, disappear and re-emerge in slant.
This is What it Feels Like is a collection of interweaving stories by five diverse voices, exploring identity in all its multiplicity. Together, these individual stories speak to our innate interdependence as humans.
Edited by Julia Prendergast and Rebekah Clarkson.
ISBN: 9871764106832
Recent Work Press, December 2025
Praise for This is What it Feels Like:
‘In this alternately bracing and meditative collection, a chorus of distinct but complementary voices channel an echoing mosaic of experience, including ageing, sexuality, motherhood, mental health, self-doubt and self-possession. Its pleasures range from vividly realised whole worlds of moment and feeling to tiny, complex shards of recognition, reflection – and reckoning.’
—Jo Case, books editor and critic
‘This Is What It Feels Like is a collection that speaks beautifully about lives on hold, lost, or never lived; desire; illness; and bodies stretched in mothering and care. As a collection it is a joy to read. Contributions are held together by threads as fine and strong as spiders silk – not easily seen but occasionally glistening. The brevity of each piece enhances the reading pleasure, providing moments to savour, like honey sucked from the tip of a stranger’s finger or the smell of jasmine through the open window of a crowded bus.’
—Pip Williams, author of The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Bookbinder of Jericho
‘A good flash story snares the reader and tosses her heart, violently or gently. A good flash has wonder and wavering gaps, it’s elliptical and lucid, energetic in its language. The good flash sets the reader’s mind swirling because it’s cohesive or not, tender or not, angry or not. The flash pieces in This Is What it Feels Like possess all of these qualities, and they are of-the-moment and alive, pulsing with thoughtful, original ideas and questions, and spilling over with the trickiness of life. This is work, simply, to adore.’
—Nuala O’Connor, author of Birdie.
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