Widow Fantasies, Hollay Ghadery

Ghadery’s new book welcomes the spooky season with skin-crawling short stories that keep us eerily uncomfortable but deeply curious and entertained. The collection builds an atmosphere of luminous morbidity that breaks taboos of silence and despair, and the stories are riddled with absurdity and desire. They follow women dealing with violence, depression, burnout, and stinky bathrooms. They invite us to meet those women where they are — and sometimes that’s in the mirror. Widow Fantasies is a feminist love letter with the power to heal heartache by ripping it from its darkest depths and letting it sizzle and settle in the warm light of the late summer sun.

—Aurora R., Ottawa