Vertigo

This is a woman as a mother, daughter, wife, spectator, lover, mistress. Observer and commentator. Actor and reactor. Dressed up bright as a child or submerged in the grey elegance of Paris, she shifts readily between roles, countries, and languages. Skilled and successful, she controls how much she cares.Yet as every new woman emerges and every new story is told, each with a sharper, more deadpan, more aching simplicity, the calm surfaces of Joanna Walsh’s Vertigo shatter, pulling us deep into the panic that underlies everyday life.

Joanna Walsh is a writer and illustrator. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Stinging Fly, Gorse and other magazines, and has been anthologised in Dalkey’s Best European Fiction 2015, Salt’s Best British Short Stories 2014 and 2015 and elsewhere. A story collection, Fractals, was published in 2013, and her memoir Hotel was published in 2015. She writes literary and cultural criticism for The Guardian, the New Statesman and The National, is the fiction editor at 3:AM Magazine, and created and runs the Twitter hashtag #readwomen, heralded by the New York Times as ‘a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers’.