Dark Roots, by Cate Kennedy

“The stories in “Dark Roots,” the Australian writer Cate Kennedy’s first collection, are melancholy but deliberate and coolly exact. They depict characters in crisis, often so mired in what Walker Percy called the malaise of everydayness that the horror of their condition is invisible to them. Some of the stories culminate in epiphanies; others hinge on a jolt — a violent act or loss. “I love the manipulation of readers’ emotions,” Kennedy has said. “It’s like pantomime: readers want to call out to a character, ‘Don’t go in there.’” Read the review at the New York Times.