Curtis Sittenfeld'southward You lot Think It, I'll Say Information technology is a drove of 11 short stories looking at our perception of not only others but ourselves as well, and just how often nosotros get it wrong.

In 'The Earth Has Many Collywobbles', a married woman flirts with a human she meets at parties by playing You recollect it, I'll say it, putting into words the dyspeptic things she guesses he'due south thinking most their fellow guests. But she is in for a daze when, in time, she finds out what was really in his mind.

'The Nominee' sees Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, confessing her surprising truthful feelings virtually a woman announcer she has sparred with over the years. In 'Gender Studies', a visiting academic sleeps with her taxi driver, for what turns out to be all the wrong reasons.

Although it has a unlike championship to the overall collection, The World Has Many Butterflies is the title story and encapsulates what is happening in the stories Curtis Sittenfeld tells us hither.

The master charactersare playing a game, which we all play to a greater or lesser extent every bit nosotros go through life, by trying to condense another human being down to a bitesize personality trait or psychological term, and have that ascertain them or sum them up. Information technology'south virtually how we try to read and evaluate, or judge and accept/dismiss (depending on how harmless or mean-spirited you recollect the game is) the people we see throughout our lives, and how hands we're able to fool ourselves when information technology comes to our own behaviour.

The stories follow a character's rarely-voiced and privately-held internal thoughts and nosotros ofttimes come across what has changed since those misconceptions were starting time formed in their present-solar day, older selves, as in A Regular Couple andThe Prairie Wife where the tables have turned. There are exceptions to this, such as inOff the Record, where an interview with a rising star goes disastrously but helps the journalist realise something more significant, and in the final story Do-Over, where two former school friends run across up for dinner and go the risk to air their thoughts on what happened back in the day.

Equally ever, Curtis Sittenfeld's writing is abrupt and full of wry, sometimes wistful observations, such as:

I had no idea, of class, that of all the feelings of my youth that would pass, information technology was this one of an affluence of time so great equally to be routinely unfillable, that would vanish with the least anniversary.

How truthful. And in that location's also this telling observation by the same grapheme in Vocalisation Clamantis in Deserto:

I'm relieved to take aged out of that visceral sense that my primary obligation is to be pretty… Did I used to think existence pretty was my master obligation considering I was in some mode delusional? Or was it that I'd captivated the messages I was meant to absorb with the same diligence with which I studied?

I enjoyed the stories in this collectiononly peculiarly admired The Nominee for its perfect build up to that idea-provoking concluding question; Gender Studies for how opportunity arises and is taken reward of because of an oversight; The World Has Many Butterflies for the title game in all its waspish glory; and, surprisingly considering it starts off at a prenatal yoga class, Bad Latch for how nosotros can exist besides quick to dismiss someone, and also never really know what is going on in their life at any ane time.

One of my personal favourites inside the collection is Plausible Deniability where two people connect over a shared love of classical music yet each still sees the human relationship between them so very differently. And I felt for the journalist in the final story, Off the Record, which shows the other side to the publicity automobile and dovetails nicely with its opening story, The Nominee.

You Think It, I'll Say Itis far kinder to its participants than the two characters were when playing the same game inThe World Has Many Butterflies.Curtis Sittenfeld's writing is both intelligent and insightful every bit she gently skewers contemporary social mores with her knowing observations and wry humour.

You Call back It, I'll Say Information technology past Curtis Sittenfeld is published past Blackness Swan and Doubleday, imprints of Transworld, part of the Penguin Random House Group of Companies. It is available equally an audiobook, ebook, in hardback and in paperback. You tin detect it at Amazon Britain or buy it from Hive where purchases assistance back up your local contained bookshop.

'Do-Over' was shortlisted for the 2018 Sunday Time EFG Short Story Award. Curtis Sittenfeld is the Lord's day Times bestselling author ofEligible andAmerican Wife. For more information on her and her books, visit her Author Website or follow her on Twitter.

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