Hot Little Hands

A familiar yet highly inventive collection of short fiction which hits virtually all my buttons: dark humor, complex female characters, and a strong summer camp storyline.

Lena Dunham

Funny, utterly absorbing, sad, brilliant, troubling in all the right ways. The stories connect to both the child and the adult in these girls, and in the reader too – I found myself lurching between embarrassed recognition and distant familiarity. Powerful, disturbing stuff - and also laugh-out-loud hilarious at times. Ulman has brilliantly mixed these different registers together into the one collection to capture something of the drama and joy and trauma of being young and female.

Ceridwen Dovey

The stories are beautifully paced, the dialogue perfect. Ulman knows how to write a story, manage a build-up, hold your attention, suggest that somehow nothing much is happening while, in fact, everything is going on. I love how up-to-the-minute and street-wise the stories are, and how frank about sex and girls. This is a book which I think girls will relish, guys will need to read in order to know what girls are really thinking about, and every parent will need to keep by their bedside, especially at the weekend, so they can be fully reassured that their young daughters are having a truly good time.

Colm Toibin

Abigail divines the humour and hurt in all manners of young life ... These stories bristle with true-to-life conversational zest.

threethousand.com

There's not one thing wrong with these stories ... Ulman's ability to lure readers to a slow dawning is a rare skill. In Warm-ups, the strongest story in the collection, we follow 13-year-old gymnast Kira from Vladivostok as she plans her first trip away from her family, to America with her coach for a demonstration. It's simply wonderful and left my heart thumping. Finding nine killer short stories linked by theme is a difficult task, even for a writer with decades under her belt. If this is what Ulman is already capable of, Hot Little Hands will prove the start of a stellar career.

Saturday Paper

You wince at some of the things the girls say, you fear for them, you barrack for them because – and this is testament to Ulman's talent – they come to life on the page. There is a deftness in the creation of these voices, these characters as negotiating new places and events they don't fully understand.

Jason Steger, The Age

Gives the competitive coming-of-age collective a hefty hip and shoulder.

Weekend Post

Ulman's stories are honest and will definitely strike a chord with readers. There's a compelling freshness and energy in these stories that makes Hot Little Hands an addictive read.

Readings

'Hot Little Hands is brilliant, disquieting, hilarious and full of joy. Abigail Ulman is a master storyteller.

Michaela McGuir

Full of unsettling and glorious portrayals of female desire, these women are conflicted, fierce, funny and strikingly familiar. Ulman has an immense talent for writing authentic voices.

Emily Sexton, head of programming at The Wheeler Centre

What a writer! Sending telepathic champagne.

Kaz Cooke

First-class. Funny, sad, and full of sharp observations and characters.

Jason Steger

The strength of many of the stories in her collection lies in the space she leaves to the unsaid ... Ulman has found rich fictional territory.

Sydney Review of Books

Ulman's skill is in negotiating this territory, of balancing the blase narration of her characters with an understated but devastating consideration of the implicit emotional impact of their experiences ... Funny honesty is one of the most striking and delightful features of the book ... The fragility and uncertainty that Ulman brings to her portrayals of female adolescence and rites of passage are sensitive and subtle.

Weekend Australian