Topics of Conversation

What is the shape of a life? Is it the things that happen to us? Or is it the stories we tell about the things that happen to us? Miranda Popkey's remarkable debut novel follows one woman as she makes her way through two decades of bad relationships, motherhood, crisis and consolation, each new episode narrated through the conversations she has with other women: in private with friends, late at night at parties with acquaintances, with strangers in hotel rooms, in moments of revelation, shame, intimacy, cynicism and desire. From the coast of the Adriatic to sun-soaked California, Topics of Conversation maps out one woman's life through the stories of the women around her and the men they've known. Full of the uncertainty of the present and the instability of the past, sizzling with enigmatic desire, it is a seductive exploration of life as a woman in the modern world, of the stories we tell ourselves and of the things we reveal only to strangers.