Book Club Questions
1. What device or purpose do the intermissions serve, and how did they influence your reading of the book? Did they give the collection more meaning?
2. How did the titular story change your idea of what the ‘know’ in Women I Know means?
3. What kind of knowing do you think is intended by the author?
4. In what ways are these stories universal, and in what ways are they not?
5. How did this book meet, not meet, or flip your expectations?
6. What did you make of the reoccurring themes to bodies of water throughout the book?
7. How about the references to vertigo? How did the epigraph deepen the references to vertigo throughout the book,
if at all?
8. What did you think about the different approaches to form in this book?
Winner of the 2023 NSW Premier’s Literary Award, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing
SMH Best Young Australian Novelist of 2023
‘My God darling—the women I know.’
A young woman tries to cheat her algorithm, creating a wholesome online persona while her ‘real’ life dissipates. A grandmother speaks to her granddaughter through the fog of generations. Two lovers divide over alternative meat options. A factory worker fits eyes in companion dolls until she is called on to install her own.
The women I know are sharp, absurd, sly, wrong, wry, repressed, hungry, horny, bold, envious, dominating, uncertain, overdetermined, underpaid, bored, smart, crystalizing, themselves.
A burning talent with growing international recognition, Katerina Gibson’s work has appeared in Granta, Kill Your Darlings, Overland and elsewhere. She is the Pacific regional winner of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and recipient of the Felix Meyer Scholarship.
‘Smart, gleeful, savage, funny and genuinely brilliant. I kept wanting to cry out with joy! Katerina Gibson is a superstar.’ Miles Allinson, author of In Moonland and Fever of Animals
‘[These stories] demonstrate an intellectual and imaginative power in their fearless probing into corners of the human world we didn’t even think existed until now. ... an author prepared to question and disrupt everything. This is an assured collection, audacious, dark, comic, and full of surprises – it demands to be reread, several times.’ Debra Adelaide, ABR
'Women I Know is a rich, contemporary blend of inventive and entertaining writing. Dark and funny, Katerina Gibson’s stories are sparkling with ideas – it’s thrilling that the future of Australian fiction is held in such talented hands.' Ben Walter, author of What Fear Was
'Come for the bold conceits, stay for the savage disaffection. These mind-bending stories startle, surprise, beguile and devastate. Gibson’s talent, in striking out from the shores of realism, is to bring us closer to the truths of contemporary life.' Jo Lennan, author of In the Time of Foxes
‘[T]he pieces in Gibson’s fiction debut create an elegant and subtle whole, with delicate prose that moves the reader as expertly as it disturbs them.’ Georgia Brough, Books+Publishing
‘Katerina Gibson is a serious writer whose talent is going to envelop the whole world--you heard it here first. Reading this book made me genuinely excited and genuinely appalled by the depth of Gibson's promise.' Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries