Books
“Ella Voss portrays the human experience to the fullest, deeper than one life, yet always grounded in the small turbulences and graces of our emotional trajectories.”
Simone Heller, Hugo Award finalist
A collection of stories and personal essays for the modern woman who is tired of being asked whether she is married, has children and a career, but not whether she is happy. Life has no shopping list for happiness – we need to make sense of it on our own terms. This book celebrates the Almost Happy moments of life, often underrated but at the core of the human experience …
The modern notion of happiness – a state of constant joy when ticking off the shopping list of life, including marriage, children and a career – is a tricky one: Either it is unattainable, or it does not lead to the expected fulfilment. Instead, we need to make sense of our life journey on our own terms. And at its crossroads we feel most alive and encounter our true selves. Rather than mourning the lover we did not kiss or the path we did not take, this book celebrates the Almost Happy of such encounters.
In 12 short stories accompanied by personal essays, Ella Voss takes us on a wild journey of soul-searching. She makes us walk beside a panther in New York and encounter Gaudí in Barcelona. Her journey takes us from India to Paris to Bali, to the deepest abyss of the human soul and back.
“In Like a Fox to a Swallow, characters navigate the confusion of modern relationships in an intense battle for connection. With withering insight, Voss exposes her characters in all their human complexity with truly brilliant flashes of unforgettable prose.”
Elizabeth Carter Wellington, author of Circus Girl: A Novel
Helen Kings and Alma Carneggio couldn’t be more different: While Helen makes a living as a single mum and partner in a London law firm, Alma lives a privileged life as the wife of a Milanese industrial aristocrat. Yet, their lives are haunted by the same tragedy: the mysterious death of Luca Carneggio, Alma’s son and Helen’s lover- and the father of Helen’s teenage daughter Emmy.
While Alma drifts through her days on painkillers and tranquillizers, hiding in her family’s estate, Helen keeps up the façade of a tough self-made woman. But in her quiet moments, only a ghost Luca keeps her company – and her resentment towards the Carneggios alive. She blames them for the dreams she had to give up. But as Emmy turns into a young adult, this truth is being challenged – until it finally falls apart.
The reader follows Alma and Helen on their winded – and sometimes funny – ways to come to terms with their past. When Alma is suddenly stripped of her family corset, she begins to long for meeting her only granddaughter. But is it too late for a new beginning?