Safe Places

Stories

In this prizewinning debut collection of twelve stories, Kerry Dolan explores with deftness, insight, and humor the uncertainty of modern life and the lives of characters, often women, navigating the fault lines of their existence. In settings ranging from the urban (New York, the Bay Area, Chicago) to the American West and Australian outback, Dolan evokes an unpredictable and uncertain world, along with the longing, desires, search for connection, and search for place of her characters. In the title story, the protagonist becomes preoccupied with the dangers in her furniture and begins getting rid of it, piece by piece, until she finds someone who provides her with the dubious possibility of safety. A woman traveling alone through the Australian outback lands in a small mining town where finding a rare black opal becomes the most important desire in her life. Two teenage girls have a fateful encounter with a mysterious stranger over the course of a summer day, while a nomadic surfer moves with an older man to a remote town where everything seems to go wrong.

Exploring the vagaries of life, human connection, and desire, the voice-driven stories in this sparkling collection show a mastery of form and a keen understanding of the fraying bonds of the American landscape.

Praise for Safe Places

"Safe Places gathers up stories of menace—the dangers of other people, the toxins of modern life—and a hedging affection for place. It's a rumination on love, on loyalty and chance, a story collection brimming with surprises and quiet insight into why we fail, why we want, what sustains us. Infidelity and heartache, wanderlust, lust, superstition—all are here, seen largely through the radiant vulnerability of being a woman. I love the clean candor of these sentences, the buoyant generosity of this heart."

— From Juniper Prize Judge, Noy Holland, author of I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like

"In these sharp-witted, provocative, disquieting stories, Kerry Dolan yanks you into the lives of her characters and holds on tight. These stories have spare but evocative prose, dialogue that cuts to the heart, and the sort of insight that makes you feel as if a character is whispering marvels into your ear. Kerry Dolan is a writer who abducts—you'll want more from her no matter how much you read."

— Lisa Carey, author of The Stolen Child

"A blues song in the key of Berriault, Michaels, and Paley. In Brooklyn, Chicago, and Northern California, Kerry Dolan's vulnerable, diffident characters traverse American adolescence, adulthood, nomadism, sexual anomie, and the snub-nosed paper-airplane endings of real life with a psychology so fine it aches."

— Edie Meidav, author of Kingdom of the Young

"There's something achingly humane about the stories in Kerry Dolan's collection Safe Places. . . luminous . . . Dolan goes down to the roots, where all good stories must go. A must-read collection."

— Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Others