Body Language: Twelve unforgettable portraits of heartbreak and desire

Product Description

Life-changing moments. Impassioned encounters. Twelve stories at the crossroads of heartbreak and desire.

When a long-lost love comes knocking, a loyally wedded rancher is tempted by old passions. A bartender wrestling with sobriety is pushed to the edge by a familiar barfly. After her husband’s death, a famous composer struggles to write a single note.

From international flights to hidden grottoes and a nude beach, twelve wayward souls seek to satisfy their deepest hungers and escape their fears.

Body Language explores our often-misguided quest for happiness and connection. If you like vulnerable explorations of carnal cravings, challenging moral quandaries, and transformative self-reflection, then you’ll love these
heartbreaking and unforgettable portraits of people yearning for the solace of human touch.

Buy
Body Language to embrace all that binds us today!

Review

From Kirkus Reviews

MacDonald reads the room in each story and sees not just the postures and worn shoes of their inhabitants, but also their inner states. Throughout this collection, she builds many such rooms for her readers to survey, populated by people whose body language speaks volumes. The fictional worlds are fully fleshed-out, and the stories’ wide-ranging premises and subtle endings yield a sense of wonder.

From Midwest Book Review

…a literary, psychologically engrossing series of portraits of individuals who, in different ways, stand at the crossroads of change…– Diane Donovan

From Readers’ Favorites

We are human, we all feel love, fear, sadness, bitterness and no one can escape these, no matter how hard we try not to step into that bear trap of pathos. It is my fervent belief that anyone who reads this book may possibly be healed of some sort of trauma. I know that it helped me deal with some of my own familial problems.– Erin Nicole Cochran

From US Review of Books

These stories paint a picture of the human condition of wanting to love and be loved on many levels–self, romantic, platonic, and familial. — Gabriella Tutino

In this new collection by Marylee Macdonald there is heat, the kind that melts the tarmac and makes you sweat when you’re sitting still, and makes every encounter between her characters fraught and strangely meaningful. This is a collection that can be savored, scene by scene and also line by line. You will be surprised and fascinated, and moved, as, whatever your expectations, these stories will go somewhere else that’s even better. — Sharon Solwitz, author of Once, in Lourdes, Blood and Milk, and Bloody Mary

Wry, heartwarming, and richly dramatic, these stories reach across decades, from troubled young adulthood to precarious old age, and reaffirm what remains human and vulnerable in all of us. — Tara Ison, author of Child Out of Alcatraz and Reeling Through Life

MacDonald’s immersive language makes us inhabit the bodies of her vividly drawn characters through sensations: the chill of a dark, empty church at night; the softness of an old woman’s skin; or the taste of chocolate on the lips of an endlessly hungry woman. These are sensations that reveal what runs beneath the physical–the soul’s yearnings to connect. MacDonald’s profound insight and compassion are triumphs of this indelible collection. — Lynn Sloan, author of This Far Isn’t Far Enough and Principles of Navigation

…unforgettable portraits of people crossing out of hopeless suspension into vulnerable hope and tender communion.– Kevin McIlvoy, author of Little Peg and The Fifth Station

MacDonald’s savvy understanding of human relationships, and her vibrantly poetic prose, make for riveting stories you can’t put down and must pause at length between, imagining what came before and what comes next.– Richard Lemm, author of Shape of Things to Come and Burning House

From the Back Cover

Welcome to the short stories of Marylee MacDonald, where spiritual sojourners seek their hearts’ desires. John