Love Stories for Valentines 2016

Australian Love Stories, edited by Cate Kennedy received overwhelmingly positive reviews. This  must read is a perfect Valentines gift.

See, it’s great, serious, considered, wild and heady stuff.
—Dave Graney, The Adelaide Review

Kennedy has done a superb job compiling this complex and intelligent collection.
—Johanna Leggat, Sydney Morning Herald

The stories whisper to each other and are informed by proximity or distance, or, to reprise a musical metaphor from Kennedy’s introduction, the song plays in service to the album.
—Francesca Sasnaitis, Australian Book Review

It’s a surprising selection. Surprising because of the anthology’s broad scope, with not a whiff of melodrama, sentimentality or cliché. Surprising too for its narrative arc, reflecting ‘the way love comes, creates its own disorders, then transforms itself and us in the process’…
—Rosemary Stevens, Westerly Magazine

Every so often, a book captures a reader’s imagination and takes on the quality of a stolen moment. Australian Love Stories is one of those gems, allowing readers the secret pleasure of a story at a time.
—Amanda Ellis, The West Australian.

With 29 stories chosen by Australian short story superstar Cate Kennedy…I’m Cupid’s quiver groaning with arrows (each unique).
—Marjorie Lewis-Jones, A Bigger Brighter World

…the highlights are so many that when I started to put together my favourites from the 29 stories on offer, the list quickly became a regurgitation of the table of contents.
—John Boland, Musings of a Literary Dilettante

Destiny, heat and lust, cold betrayal, unrequited. It’s all here.
—Kerenlee Thompson, Kerenlee Thompson.com

But, here’s the thing. How to write about a collection in which pretty well every story moved me?
—Sue Terry, Whispering Gums.com

The anthology does, however, resemble Anna Karenina in its ability to present multiple contrasting relationships and evoke the complexity and uncertainty of love.
—Daniel Young, Writers Bloc