By Kerryn Goldsworthy
The Whip Hand: Stories
Mihaela Nicolescu and Nadine Browne
The Whip Hand: stories about women on the edge.Credit: Shutterstock
Fremantle Press, $27.99
As its title suggests, The Whip Hand is about power, full of characters determined to take, or to take back, control of their lives. This is a publishing venture of a kind I have never seen before, a pair of short collections by two different writers: there are nine stories each in Mihaela Nicolescu's The Returning and Nadine Browne's Playing Dead. Both writers live in Perth but Browne was raised as a born-again Christian while Nicolescu was born in Romania and has lived in Sweden and Britain. But their excellent and sometimes startling stories have a sisterly similarity of theme, and the two collections fit surprisingly well together. Both write tales of women on the edges of society, or of despair, or even of reason, fighting to regain their equilibrium. The best stories here are Nicolescu's The Impressionist, a hard look at the teaching profession, and Browne's The Jerry Can, a story about different kinds of damage.
