Skin: stories
Advance praise for Skin: stories, forthcoming from Goose Lane Editions, April 22, 2025. Available from pre-order here.
Catherine Bush asks the most daring question, how do we connect? Not only with those close to us, but with strangers, the natural world, and a climate crisis. The characters in these stories make a bold reach across a void — I loved what I found on the other side, a collection that is incredibly tender, tumultuous, and touching. – Claire Cameron, author of The Bear and The Last Neanderthal
Skin is an intimate collection of stories that reveal people at their most vulnerable and their most dangerous. Subtle, stinging and beautifully observed, the title story still has its grip on my heart. – Tessa McWatt, author of Shame On Me and The Snow Line
Deftly woven through a thematic tapestry of surfaces and skin, these stories are memorable, riveting, and seismic. Catherine Bush pens tender anthems of verboten intimacy and familial survival, earth and flesh and glacial being. These expertly crafted stories are held together by exquisite narrative tensions, each a precious, rare jewel. This book will make you rethink this world, peel back its many skins. – David Huebert, author of Oil People and Chemical Valley
Skin dives under the surface of relationships, revealing hidden streams of desire, longing, pain, and deliverance. In successive stories that are penetrating and absorbing, Catherine Bush also explores how we are deepening our love affair, in this time of climate storms and glacier melt, with the more-than-human world. A mysterious tenderness animates these stories. They ache for what we love. Skin is a brave and haunting book, and Catherine Bush is an important voice for our times. — Shaena Lambert, author of Petra and Oh, My Darling