The women in these stories are at all times, through their many varied emotions, entirely reasonable... at least to themselves. They each do what they need to do and believe what they need to believe. They are trustful, loyal, and believing, but also heedless, rash, and detached. They fall in and out of love, they suffer and overcome loss and, when things go wrong, they simply start again. Their experiences make them resilient, unfazed, practical, but also demanding, persistent, determined. Would they lie to you, conjure up ghosts, steal your lover, put a spell on you? Probably. Yes.
The Book of Reasonable Women is a collection of thirty contemporary short stories, exploring themes of assimilation, identity, ethnicity, accountability, self-reliance, remembering, and entirely purposeful forgetting. It illustrates both with humour and compassion the remarkable reasonableness of women.  

Janet Olearski is a London-born writer of Polish descent. She studied languages and linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, and the University of London Institute of Education. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in Constellate, Far Off Places, Wasafiri, Bare Fiction, and elsewhere. She is the author of several children's books, among them Mr. Football, The Sunbird Mystery, and The Boy Who Never Smiled. Her work also includes the story collection A Brief History of Several Boyfriends, a novel A Traveller's Guide to Namisa and, as editor and contributor, The Write Stuff anthology. A graduate of the Manchester Writing School at MMU, she has lived and worked in Italy, Poland, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, where she founded the Abu Dhabi Writers' Workshop. She is now based in Central Portugal. Find her at https://janetolearski.com and Twitter: @JanetOlearski