This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories

This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories

Summary

These loosely connected hypnotic stories about memory and desire, from Giller Prize winner Johanna Skibsrud, introduces us to an astonishing array of characters who time and again find themselves face to face with what they didn’t know they didn’t know, at the exact point of intersection between impossibility and desire.

A young maid at a hotel in France encounters a man who asks to paint her portrait, only later discovering that he is someone other than who we think he is. A divorced father who fears estrangement from his thirteen-year-old daughter allows her to take the wheel of his car, realising too late that he’s made a grave mistake. Taking readers from South Dakota to Paris, to Japan, into art galleries, foreign apartments, farms and beach hotels, This Will Be Difficult to Explain is a masterful and perceptive series of tales from one of fiction’s brightest new voices.

Reviews

  • The characters in these note-perfect stories tend to make their most important discoveries by stumbling against them…The writing here is an absolute joy to read; clear, economical and condensed.
    Kate Saunders, The Times

About the author

Johanna Skibsrud

Johanna Skibsrud is the author of two collections of poetry. The Sentimentalists, her first novel, won the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada's most prestigious literary award. She is also the author of a collection of short stories This Will Be Difficult To Explain. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.
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