Winner of the 2020 Moon City Short Fiction Award
One Person Away From You is a collection of stories that oscillates between the fantastic and the familiar: for every woman who turns into a swan, there’s a man who bungles a romantic relationship in Italy; for every sky that rains a torrent of laughter, there’s a husband reminiscing about his honeymoon. Above all, the stories explore our common lot of lostness and longing, our question of whether our life and loves are the right ones or the product of some cosmic error. Whether it’s a sea appearing suddenly in a bone dry valley, an angel musing on his relationship with a mortal woman, or a narrator yearning for an absent lover the deeply emotional stories search for meaning. Throughout this collection, characters and entire towns search through the constructs of identity, time, fairy tales, and love letters, to find the flicker of constancy in the sea of change that is human life.
“Andrew Bertaina is a fantastically talented writer, and the stories in
One Person Away From You are endlessly inventive, formally surprising, and as funny as they are moving. Prepare to be overwhelmed by Bertaina’s endless imagination, which offers nothing less than excess and delight on every page.”
—Matt Bell, author of
Appleseed“Each story in Andrew Bertaina’s
One Person Away From Youis a shimmering monument to the lies we tell ourselves to get through the day. Seeing our own lies unfold on the page, the reader glimpses a world where we do not merely live and die alone, which might be Bertaina’s greatest trick. His stories are that blend of invasive and cathartic that only seems to exist in worthy short fiction. Beautiful, somber, heartbreaking life in motion.
—Seth Borgen, author of
If I Die in Ohio“With an enormous generosity of splĂ@
![One Person Away From You: Stories [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/2/3/3/2_5214833.jpg "One Person Away From You: Stories [Paperback]")