One Sun Only, Camille Bordas
One Sun Only, Camille Bordas
List: $22.00 | Sale: $15.40
Club: $11.00

One Sun Only
Stories

Author: Camille Bordas

Narrator: Vas Eli, Ferdelle Capistrano, Saskia Maarleveld, Michael Crouch

Unabridged: 8 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/27/2026


Synopsis

A stunning collection of stories exploring love and art, luck and loss, from the “invaluable” (George Saunders) author of How to Behave in a Crowd and The Material

“These stories don’t close so much as continue inside you. They tilt the world and don’t set it back, leaving you to live with the shift.”—Morgan Talty, author of Fire Exit and Night of the Living Rez

A young woman takes stock after the burglary of her apartment. A teenager becomes obsessed with the obituaries in a weekly magazine. Grandchildren mourn the grandparents who loved them and the grandparents who didn’t. Painters and almost-painters try to distinguish Good Art from Bad Art. People grapple with life-altering illness, unrequited love, and promises they have every intention of keeping. Some win the lottery. Others don’t.

In these sinewy, thoughtful stories, celebrated New Yorker contributor Camille Bordas delves into the mysteries of life, death, and all that happens in between. At once darkly funny and poignantly self-aware, Bordas’s writing offers a window into our shared, flawed humanity without insisting on a perfect understanding of our experiences.

With her first collection, which gathers previously unpublished stories alongside work originally featured in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, Bordas cements her reputation as a master of the form.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Dona's on February 04, 2026

Pre-Read Notes: I love short fiction collections and this title appealed. Final Review "There are posters of famous, good-looking women over some beds, to give the girls who pinned them courage, Eugene assumes. They go to sleep telling themselves they’ll look like this one day, maybe at the end of ca......more

Goodreads review by ari on December 10, 2025

Every story was very well-written and developed. I appreciated the direct writing style. My favorite story was Beyond. I was laughing out loud while I read it, and honestly would have read another 300 pages of it! I like how every story is relatively simple in terms of plot, but has depth and mild t......more

Goodreads review by BookOfCinz on February 08, 2026

Camille Bordas really does have a way with words. I love a collection of short stories and this one I enjoyed reading. I will say, some of the stories were really good and the other fell flat but overall enjoyable.......more

Goodreads review by Remi on November 18, 2025

this is a collection of introspective, emotionally perceptive short stories that felt refreshingly different from most collections i’ve read recently. camille bordas writes with a calm, observant tone that lingers on the small shifts, disappointments, realisations, and quiet absurdities that shape a......more

Goodreads review by Kasa on January 26, 2026

Each story is a gem, and once again I'll repeat -- a collection of well written short stories is more challenging than a novel of equal length, especially one as richly developed as this. My only reservation is that the stories just end Like that. Abruptly with no warning, each and every one of them......more


Quotes

“Early in reading The Presentation on Egypt, I came across a moment of such pure narrative electricity, I knew then that I would go on to read everything else Camille Bordas had written.”—Parker Tarun, Washington Square Review

One Sun Only is one of the best new collections I’ve read in a long time, not just for lines which pack in pathos and humor, conveyed through a character whom Bordas makes lively and real, but also for the pleasant experience of reading several such pieces back-to-back. How nice to move between their carefully crafted little worlds, and to be continually surprised.”—The Telegraph

“[Stories] brimming with human frailty, vulnerability, and the delicious pain of living.”—The Chicago Review

“Told with sparkling energy . . . Joy, sorrow and worry bubble under the surface, and Bordas beautifully teases out these emotional truths.”The Daily Mail

“Highly recommend[ed] . . . imaginative, wry.”—The Independent

“There’s bound to be something here to captivate you.”—Express

“Camille Bordas writes toward the quiet pressure points—the joke with a bruise under it, the love that won’t behave, the losses that don’t end when the funeral does. The prose is exact, unshowy, funny when it hurts to be, and tender without asking for mercy. These stories don’t close so much as continue inside you. They tilt the world and don’t set it back, leaving you to live with the shift.”—Morgan Talty, author of Fire Exit and Night of the Living Rez

“Bordas’s narrators share a particular sensibility—smart, mordantly funny, and sharp-eyed about contemporary life on both sides of the Atlantic—but the stories themselves never land where you might expect. I hope this is the first of many collections, because I want to be reading Bordas for the rest of my life.”—Nell Freudenberger, author of The Limits and Lucky Girls

“[Bordas’s stories are] perfectly formed marvels, funny, skeptical, self-aware, and humane. I love them for their seeming lightness: there [is] clearly a super-keen intellect at work, but one keen and confident enough to express itself as simply as possible, to let itself be fully metabolized by the story, with no showy remainder.”Literary Hub

“Bordas probes her privileged characters’ existential dread in this masterful collection. . . . Distinguished by the author’s sly wit and complex understanding of the human condition, these stories leave a mark.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Sublime . . . With sharp humor, Bordas’ stories reveal the fragile seams in her characters’ current states while also nimbly exposing the peculiarities of human nature.”Booklist

“A dozen stories brimming with life, each as unpredictable as a chain of thoughts . . . Bordas’s stories don’t defy summary so much as they chortle at it. . . . Bordas is a master vivisectionist of inner life. . . . There’s nothing here that feels finessed or artificed. . . . Utterly delightful.”Kirkus Reviews, starred review