Hold Your Fire

Winner of the 2022 NSW Premier's Literary Award's UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing

Shortlisted for 2022 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award

Chosen as a ‘Book of the Year’ in the Sydney Morning Herald and Kill Your Darlings

Dark and dangerous, brilliantly unsettling and chillingly funny, this extraordinary debut shows us what we usually deny – the uneasy truce we make with our ruthless desires and gothic fears, and how easily it can be broken. Prize-winning author Chloe Wilson’s stories will pin you to the page.

‘Chilling, funny, and razor sharp – a writer in control every step of the way. How I relished this extraordinary and original collection.’ - Sofie Laguna, Miles Franklin winner for The Eye of the Sheep

The debut of an unforgettable new voice in Australian fiction, Hold Your Fire exposes the battles we wage beneath the surface.

The title story takes us into the cold war of a contemporary family: a missile-making mother doubts her husband’s guts and the steel of her son, until a playground incident escalates and brings them into the most surprising of alliances.

Needle-sharp, effortlessly surprising and beautifully controlled, every tale will pin you to the page. A young couple move into a house in which there’s been a recent murder and fall under the spell of their peculiar, commanding neighbours. Two sisters are determined to detoxify themselves into perfection. A diver pushes herself and those around her to higher and higher leaps. Interspersed with these are lightning strikes of flash fiction: we glimpse a leopard in the apartment next door; plants grown out of a strange and miraculous soil; the spirit of a girl who’s been thrown down a well.

At each turn, Chloe Wilson offers a unique insight, a tear in the veil of our moral certainties. Her stories strip away the varnish of our decency to reveal the raw mechanics beneath.

‘I absolutely LOVED this collection.’ - Leigh Sales

‘Chloe Wilson’s stories are spooky, profound, thrilling, hilarious and unbelievably beautiful. She shows us things we don’t dare see — desire and power, love and subterranean violence — with such mastery that the sheer beauty of them blows you away. I want to read everything she’s ever written, everything she’ll ever write. A truly extraordinary writer.’ - Anna Funder, author of Miles-Franklin winning All That I Am and Stasiland

‘The stories in Chloe Wilson’s Hold Your Fire are full of wit, intelligence, savage humour, and dark surprises. They combine the brilliant menace of Ottessa Mossfegh with the insight and control of Helen Garner; the result is a new Australian writer who made me feel less like a reader and more like a conspirator. I was transfixed.’ - Fiona McFarlane, author of Miles Franklin-shortlisted The Night Guest and The High Places

‘These stories are wonderfully strange, complex yet funny; they are otherworldly and unearthly but at the same time an expression of how we live in the world right now. Chloe Wilson is the magician who by her art brings to light all we usually prefer to keep hidden.’ - Ceridwen Dovey, author of Only the Animals and In the Garden of the Fugitives

'Incisive and darkly funny' - Books & Publishing

'* ... marks the arrival of a new powerhouse in Australian short fiction' - The AU Review