The Carnal Fugues is a wayward, wanton selection of stories grounded in displacement, desire, and the wish coursing through us to accede to the state of love. 

There is torment and illness, crude reality and distant fragrant places, peopled by characters that reside close to our bones, our psyches, our flesh. 

Are we an unthinking species, condemned to misunderstand one another? Or do our near misses amount to valid templates for modern existence? 

There is diseased love, frugal love, contorted love, where the inroads of the past – and convention – colour and confine us; there is the love of life in the face of death, and the persistence of our carnal compulsions.  

A Japanese soprano has lost her voice and seeks repose on a sailing boat in Corsica. A South African advertising executive learns the ropes at his Accra office. In London, a Roman man happens upon a woman from the past, bringing back a passionate interlude he has hidden from himself. 

Destructive lovers interview a renowned musician in dusty Bamako. Retirees from Paris visit a laden property in the south of France, and an untamed Greek island brings a widow back to the ebb of life.  Lovers meet, fade, delude. 

We are weak and defiant beings, ever-learning, ever-lustful.