Our May Ink & Drink book club choice was Send Nudes by Saba Sams, which has been described as "'acute portraits of the fragile intimacies and euphoric moments snatched by a generation of women coming of age into a precarious future". With striking wit, originality and tenderness, Send Nudes celebrates the small victories in a world that tries to claim each young woman as its own.
In ten dazzling stories, Saba Sams dives into the world of girlhood and immerses us in its contradictions and complexities: growing up too quickly, yet not quickly enough; taking possession of what one can, while being taken possession of; succumbing to societal pressure but also orchestrating that pressure. These young women are feral yet attentive, fierce yet vulnerable, exploited yet exploitative.
Threading between clubs at closing time, pub toilets, drenched music festivals and beach holidays, these unforgettable short stories deftly chart the treacherous terrain of growing up - of intense friendships, of ambivalent mothers, of uneasily blended families, and of learning to truly live in your own body.
Let us help you discover the stories with our Ink & Drink questions:
Which stories were your favourite and why? Were there any that you disliked?
What did you think about the collection altogether? Did you think the stories were placed in the right order? What did you think of the stories' content in the context of the collection as a whole?
In 'Tinderloin', the collection's opening story, Gracie appraises Ryan, the man she has met on Tinder, as if he is a cut of meat, saying he has a 'good ratio of muscle to fat'. In the end, his dog Petal comes to the same conclusion when she attacks him. What is the effect of the metaphors of meat and butchery employed throughout the story?
In 'Overnight', friends Maxine and Jos are in a club together, Jos frantically looking for a lost earring on the floor whilst Maxine catches a glimpse of George, an old friend, across the dance floor. The story flits back to a house party years before, describing how George sexually assaults Maxine, saying 'what do you mean?' when she asks him what he had done to her. What do you think Jos' constant search for the lost earring in the background of the story symbolises?
In 'Snakebite', university student Meg befriends party girl Lara, whose favourite drink is a snakebite, because whenever she drank 'she was only in it to get fucked, she didn't care about the taste'. As their friendship develops, Meg buys Lara a pet rabbit, hoping it will cheer her up. At the story's end when Lara has left Meg's life for good, Meg finds the rabbit shut in the wardrobe, shut in by Lara when she was packing up her clothes. What do the drink and the rabbit symbolise in this story?
In 'Send Nudes', the story's nameless narrator experiments with her sexuality by sending a naked picture of herself to a stranger on an app after overcoming feelings of shame and worries of rejection about the size of her body. The next day, she enjoys a pain au raisin, 'flakes of pastry collecting with each bite in the fold of her cleavage'. How does the narrator's relationship with food alter throughout this story?
In 'Flying Kite', cycles of birth in various forms feature throughout the story. From Sage's description of 'creatures were living between the layers of my skin, laying eggs and hatching a million times over' while she waits with the social worker for her mother to come home, to the birth of Jara and Oak's baby and the start of Kite's new life beyond their foster home. How does this story explore the themes of family, change and rebirth?
The collection begins with the epigraph from Mary Gaitskill: 'Yes we were stupid for disrespecting the limits placed before us, for trying to go everywhere and know everything. Stupid, spoiled, and arrogant. But we were right too. I was right.' How well do you think this quotation reflects the themes of the book? What are those themes?
The story 'The Bread' explores ideas of predestination and empowerment by contrasting the narrator's abortion to the act of baking a loaf of bread and reading horoscopes. What do you think the author was trying to convey in these contrasts?
The last story of the collection, Today's Square, describes one girl's response to the disappointment of having had her holiday cancelled due to the pandemic, her mum having saved up for four years to afford it. How does the author create an aura of domestic melancholy to make the girl's disappointment felt all the more keenly by the reader?
For our next Ink & Drink book club, held on Wednesday June 28th at 6.30pm, we will be reading Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto. We hope to see you there and if not look forward to sharing our questions with you soon!
About the book:
'It was a puzzle with no solution. But he did not lose heart.'
In a rocky cove in the bay of Hakata, the bodies of a young and beautiful couple are discovered. Stood in the coast's wind and cold, the police see nothing to investigate: the flush of the couple's cheeks speaks clearly of cyanide, of a lovers' suicide. But in the eyes of two men, Torigai Jutaro, a senior detective, and Kiichi Mihara, a young gun from Tokyo, something is not quite right. Together, they begin to pick at the knot of a unique and calculated crime...
Now widely available in English for the first time, Tokyo Express is celebrated around the world as Seicho Matsumoto's masterpiece - and as one of the most fiendish puzzles ever written.