If it was possible to feel sadness for something as ordinary as a wall, she was feeling it, in her temples and across her forehead, like a fever. Some people would call it a migraine but the mother knew it was more than that. It was the sadness of the whole world.
 

A daughter flies into a painting to escape her overprotective mother. At an Italian bird market, a holidaying teenager makes her first attempt at seduction. And an affair that never happens is deconstructed while tigers pace in a European zoo. Wild Gestures brings together stories of loss, desire, and opportunities missed, all orbiting the painful knowledge that the things we most long for will always remain the furthest from reach.
 

“Lucy Durneen untangles the fears and longings of her characters with a surgeon’s eye and a poet’s tongue.”

                                                                                                 — Rebekah Clarkson, author of Barking Dogs