Eleven stories of sly and disarming power, about womanhood and families - an astonishing debut by a young New Yorker editor and bold new literary voice.

'Sestanovich’s elegant prose takes seriously the quiet unrest that can ravage a life' - Raven Leilani, author of Luster
A Best Book of the Summer in The Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly,Vogue, Esquire and Refinery29

A university student is flying home to visit her family when she strikes up an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the plane. A mother prepares for her son's wedding, her own life unravelling as his comes together. A long-lost stepbrother's visit prompts a family's reckoning with its old taboos.

In these eleven powerful stories, thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women’s lives – from the brink of adulthood, to the labyrinthine path between twenty and thirty, to middle age, when certain possibilities quietly lapse. Tender, lucid and piercingly funny, Objects of Desire is a collection pulsing with subtle drama, rich with unforgettable scenes, and alive with moments of recognition, each more startling than the last - a spellbinding debut that announces a major talent.

'A debut story collection of the rarest kind . . . you wish that every single entry could be an entire novel.' — Entertainment Weekly

Clare Sestanovich named one of The National Book Foundation's '5 under 35'.

"Sublimely polished . . . collectively probe the gap between how we’re seen and how we might long to appear." - Observer

"Sestanovich's steady hand and bone-clean prose recall such foremothers as Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and Jhumpa Lahiri " - The Paris Review

"Sestanovich is an extraordinary noticer. Carefully, sparely, she parses layers of feeling and attitude; of the tiny ways we admit or refuse love; of incremental, almost invisible, losses of self" - Guardian

"The summer's most buzzed about book" - Sunday Times

"As far as writing pedigrees go, it doesn’t get much more impressive than The New Yorker and The Paris Review . . . A smart, incisive look at the complexities of being a woman right now" - Stylist

"Smart and accomplished . . . Sestanovich’s prose is poised and understated, sensorily precise . . . her gift is to make ordinary moments shine brightly" - The New York Times Book Review

"Nuanced, beautifully shaped . . . In Sestanovich’s hands, the mundane feels surprising—mesmerizing, even" - Refinery29

"Extraordinary" - Esquire

"A debut story collection of the rarest kind: One in which you wish that every single entry could be an entire novel." - Entertainment Weekly

"Luminous . . . Sestanovich writes with a kind of bracing cold-plunge clarity. Objects of Desire taps into the peculiar, primal struggle of becoming who you are, and all the stories you have to tell yourself to get there. " - Entertainment Weekly

"Sestanovich is a skilled craftswoman, each sentence a carefully positioned tile in a mosaic" - Vulture

"[Sestanovich's] characters always seem poised at the brink of some great, terrifying, wondrous unraveling" - Electric Literature

"Sestanovich’s intelligent debut collection demonstrates a gift for pithy detail that encapsulates the whole of a character’s personality or era of lived experience" - Publishers Weekly

"Exquisitely observed, and sure to stay with you long after you’ve finished" - Bustle

"Sestanovich’s writing is clever and rich with layers, just like her characters. And the textures of her sentences are as nuanced as desire itself" - Fiction Writers' Review

"Sestanovich expertly places you in the mind of different women, young and old, rich and poor, single and in relationships. The stolen glimpses into the complex minds of her characters will leave you unable to resist writing the rest of their story in your head" - Reaction

"These stories are restrained, nearly aloof, despite the fact that the characters are constantly and messily butting up against the futility of their desires" - Kirkus