Worldly Goods

"Assured and stylistically confident ... Petersen's knowledge of and precise language for subjects such as natural history, the domestic arts, and music add to the classical feel of these stories, set all around the English-speaking Commonwealth. Crisp sentences and slightly old-fashioned vocabulary combine gratifyingly with evocative visual imagery to make this collection a pleasure to read."— Publishers Weekly , starred review " Worldly Goods is a multi-faceted diamond: its carbon base is the stuff of life, and its reflective power is dazzling. Petersen can take a small event and in a few pages create an entire world ... a writer this good needs to be read."— Quill & Quire , starred review “What a thrill to follow a writer from promise to fulfillment. Alice Petersen's debut collection of short stories ... marked her as a young writer to watch. [This] collection, Worldly Goods , more than delivers."— Montreal Review of Books "Alice Petersen writes as eloquently about the natural world as she does about the world of human emotion and desire."—David Bezmozgis, author of The Free World These lyrical, open-eyed stories are set in North America, England, and the author's native New Zealand. With a focus on marriage, family, and the moral complexities that arise from these relationships, Alice Peterson's fiction evokes the best of Katherine Mansfield and Alice Munro. Alice Petersen 's first book, All the Voices Cry , won the QWF Award for Best First Book. Born in New Zealand, she now lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.

"Assured and stylistically confident ... Petersen's knowledge of and precise language for subjects such as natural history, the domestic arts, and music add to the classical feel of these stories, set all around the English-speaking Commonwealth. Crisp sentences and slightly old-fashioned vocabulary combine gratifyingly with evocative visual imagery to make this collection a pleasure to read."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Worldly Goods is a multi-faceted diamond: its carbon base is the stuff of life, and its reflective power is dazzling. Petersen can take a small event and in a few pages create an entire world ... a writer this good needs to be read."—Quill & Quire, starred review

“What a thrill to follow a writer from promise to fulfillment. Alice Petersen’s debut collection of short stories … marked her as a young writer to watch. [This] collection, Worldly Goods, more than delivers.”—Montreal Review of Books

"Alice Petersen writes as eloquently about the natural world as she does about the world of human emotion and desire."—David Bezmozgis, author of The Free World

These lyrical, open-eyed stories are set in North America, England, and the author's native New Zealand. With a focus on marriage, family, and the moral complexities that arise from these relationships, Alice Peterson's fiction evokes the best of Katherine Mansfield and Alice Munro.

Alice Petersen's first book, All the Voices Cry, won the QWF Award for Best First Book. Born in New Zealand, she now lives and works in Montreal, Quebec. "An old record player; an unposted letter; a pearl necklace never purchased; a badly written poem from the woman you love : tokens, gifts, and objects lost or left behind, desired or not wanted at all are the starting points for the stories in Worldly Goods, a new collection by Alice Petersen. The stories reveal that ownership is more than possession, for Petersen shows how small objects stand as markers of our attempts to communicate with each other."--Page 4 de la couveture "An old record player; an unposted letter; a pair of pearl earrings, never purchased: tokens, gifts, and objects lost or left behind, desired or not wanted at all are the starting points for the stories in Worldly Goods. Alice Peterson shows in these stories that ownership is both more and less than possession, for through objects we not only express identity, we also seek to communicate."-- Page 4 of cover Stories balanced between nostalgia and acceptance, sustained by the narrator's charming voice.