Send Nudes: By the winner of the BBC National Short Story Award 2022

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This story was included in your debut collection, Send Nudes. How did publishing earlier this year impact you as an author? Threading between clubs at closing time, pub toilets, drenched music festivals and beach holidays, these unforgettable short stories deftly chart the treacherous terrain of growing up – of intense friendships, of ambivalent mothers, of uneasily blended families, and of learning to truly live in your own body. Stella squats. It takes a while for the piss to come. She’s nervous with them both watching over her like that. Her aim isn’t particularly good, and she only manages to get a little bit on Jasmine’s sting. The rest splashes up around her ankles and across Jasmine’s shins. Jasmine squeezes her eyes shut and retches. In the kitchen, they boil the samphire and chop it fine with other ingredients, like capers and red onion, to make a relish. There’s a barbeque on the veranda, and Blue lines fillets of white fish over the coals. The flood lights are on in the pool, and the water looks like a huge turquoise crystal. Jasmine blushes even more then. She has her eyes on her empty plate, and she looks to Stella like she might start to cry. Nico is smiling a little, amused.

The salad has green beans in it, and the water next to Stella’s plate has been poured into a pint glass. She takes a sip. Many thanks to Bloomsbury UK and NetGalley for sharing a free copy with me in exchange for a honest review. All opinions are my own.] In the stories where the choice isn’t theirs, the girls and women suffer not only the consequences – the narrative often ends before that – but more so the torment of the lead-up. That sense of something unknown coming permeates these stories, making them slippery in the hand and yet painfully simple at the same time. After all, the choice isn’t always ours. But life is certainly better when we make them – or so Sams would have you believe. At the villa, Stella sits on the veranda with the adults while Jasmine and Blue shower and get ready to go out. It’s almost like before Blue arrived: Claire leafing through a book, Frank loading a new film into his camera. He puts the previous canister carefully into his bag, and lets out a long, low whistle. My favorite aspect is that every women we meet puts herself first, no matter the situation she's in. Whether it's difficult family situation, a new boyfriend and his sweet dog, or shooting a nude photo - these (disaster) women are in control.Content Warnings: Sexual content, Adult/minor relationship, Abortion, Alcohol, Body shaming, Drug use, Pregnancy, Sexual assault, Toxic friendship, and Miscarriage. In four of these stories, Sams attends to girls who are not quite yet in adolescence. The tenderness with which she writes “Flying Kite” is a welcome contrast to the tense fervour explored elsewhere. Meg isn’t the only one having unenthusiastic sex. Two other girls in two different stories have sex they don’t enjoy, and in the course of the act they cannot find the words or the will to insist the man use a condom and apparently have never heard of hormonal bill control like the Pill, so they both inevitably fall pregnant. “I thought it made me seem aloof not to ask the boys I slept with to put a condom on.” Yeah, ok. The girls are so indistinguishable they tend to say things that any of them could have spoken. “The future, to me, was something that would just happen.” I wrote that one down in my notes, I can’t remember which story it’s from, truly could have been any of them. Stella barely sleeps at all. It’s just past nine when she hears Frank’s voice, slightly raised, through the shutters. What the, he says.

As with most short story collections I seem to prefer some stories to others but this one is being rounded up. What distinguishes her from millennial writers such as Ottessa Moshfegh, who shares her deadpan humour and visceral style, is that her characters aren’t jaded, but voracious. They’re not immune to existential angst – “Do you ever worry that nothing you do matters?” – but they get on with living, devouring new experiences with gusto. Does this herald a tonal shift in twentysomething fiction? It’s too early to tell, but it’s precisely this earthy resilience and joie de vivre that make Send Nudes so rare and uplifting.How long did this story take to write? I read that you began working on it when you were 19 years old, and returned to it later. It's fair to say that some adjectives sound better than others. Using the better adjectives is only a little white lie, like wearing shapewear, or having lowlights put in at the salon.” I particularly enjoyed that each of the stories were from an introspective point of view, (and I love this from Sally Rooney’s writing) so it was great to see this on a different piece of work from a different author. I loved seeing the thoughts of these women and getting a slice of their lives.

Stell, says Claire. You’ll be careful tonight, won’t you? Those girls are adults. You don’t have to do the things they do. The t-shirt is tight on Blue, but in a good way. It rides up to show a strip of stomach, her bellybutton as dark and perfect as the cherries she was eating. Jasmine rolls her eyes, as she does every time Claire speaks. She’s hoping to go to Sussex, although there’s some doubt around whether she’ll get the grades. In one way it’s an incredible boost to have a book out and to know people are reading it, and on the other hand when I think about that too hard it’s completely terrifying. I can’t let myself believe that the novel I’m writing at the moment is going to be published at some point, otherwise I completely freeze up. Blue pulls the t-shirt over her head. It’s green, with little frills at the sleeves. On it is stitched a felt bumble bee and the words Bee Kind.Digital natives reared on Snapchat and Tinder, Sams’s characters are largely blase about sex. In Here Alone, seduction begins as a game for Emily – “this was her favourite part: the exchange of signs” – but she loses control. The ensuing tale of delusional desire and casual male cruelty nails rejection with stinging clarity. Family offers little by way of a safety net, as beleaguered parents inhabit an extended adolescence of their own. Roles are reversed: one daughter tries to shield her inebriated mother from social services, another fashions a consolatory beach in a high-rise flat when the pandemic scuppers a long-awaited holiday.