Opposites attract in this subtle coming-of-age debut from an American author known for her short stories

Ask Me Again, the first novel by American short story writer Clare Sestanovich, is structured around a series of questions. Each chapter title is a kind of inquiry: Did You See That?; Can You Feel That?; Can I Tell You Something? It’s a simple device, but it creates an atmosphere of interrogative uncertainty I last felt when reading Carol Shields’s Unless, a book in which adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions serve as chapter headings: Therefore; Instead; Despite. The isolated events that make up a life are connected less by tight plot lines than by little fragments of language and the hunger for connection they represent.

Sestanovich is a gifted writer when it comes to capturing appetites. The 11 short stories in her previous book, Objects of Desire, saw her selected in the US as one of The National Book Foundation’s five best writers under 35. They explored the yearnings of young women navigating the challenges of their 20s and 30s, and the trade-offs of middle age. In Ask Me Again, she starts younger, introducing us to a teenage protagonist, Eva, whose precocious hunger for adult experience is captured in three words on the novel’s very first page: “inconsistency was interesting”.