What We Might Become - by Sara Reish Desmond (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner, Short Story Collection, Storytrade Book Awards (2025)

Bronze Medal, Short Story-Fiction, Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) (2025)

An adolescent struggles with race and sexuality and her father's return from war; a spiteful social pariah finally reveals her rumored, freakish robot anatomy when she attends the senior prom with her geriatric date; an unemployed husband grows enamored with the new immigrant next door as she reveals her tragic past; and a new widower is tormented by the smell of his neighbor's expert baking and feigns that he is part bear. Sara Reish Desmond's characters find themselves at the threshold; on the verge of discovery, navigating the space between childhood and adulthood, between fidelity and scandal, between honesty and deceit. Deft and moving, What We Might Become shares the uncertainty about how we ought to live in transitional moments and, perhaps more desperately, forever.

Review Quotes

"Desmond's stories are so real, so painfully true."

-Necessary Fiction

"These stories are vivid and taut, and one of Desmond's great virtues is that she doesn't get in the way of her characters. She lets them breathe. "

-Steve Yarbrough, author of Stay Gone Days

"The cadence of the sentences, the probing, unsettling voice of her narrators, and the dark conclusions she reaches about the underside of contemporary American life. . . . Desmond writes with quiet fury. Anyone who loves short stories will want to own this one."

-Jess Row, author of The New Earth

"I will return to these haunting, perfect stories, and their evocative landscapes, again and again."

-Robin MacArthur, author of Half Wild

"You will not shake these stories easily. I certainly have not."

-Neema Avashia, author of Another Appalachia