Send Nudes by Saba Sams – Short Stories

Well, I am on a roll with my short story reading this year as Send Nudes by Saba Sams is another brilliant collection. These 10 stories are slices of contemporary life, all told from a female perspective. There’s a focus on loss and belonging; we see lives lacking strict structure and lives at the point of some sort of transformation.

But what really appealed to me were the moments of relatability. By that I don’t mean the whole characters as such, more some traits from each of that I saw in my younger self, or in my friends. The subtleness around the complex emotion that runs through these stories was really well done.

I didn’t want a baby. More, I craved the drama of an unplanned pregnancy.
the bread

Evocative reads

The stories in Send Nudes varied in length, which really worked for me to give this book great flow. Some, like The Bread, felt more like short palette cleansers – we are just listening in on a snapshot of a specific incident in someone’s life – and this balanced out the longer, more developed narratives, like Snakebite.

I found some of these stores so visceral – especially Snakebite featuring Lara. We have all known a Lara in our time – that party girl who you’re drawn to despite her vampiric, toxic tendencies. We also all have that friend who falls in love with any and every guy immediately – who we then have to coach through the drama, like Emily in Here Alone.

All of the stories left me wanting to know more about the characters they featured – particularly Grace from Tenderloin and the aforementioned, Emily who both broke my heart a little due to the reflective element I mentioned above.

Ending on a surprisingly tear-jerking lockdown themed story, this collection of short stories feels so relevant and personal, they are still rumbling around my mind days later. A great read.