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The Good Eye
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The Good Eye

By: Jess Gibson
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Men and women confront the limits of their perception as reality shifts around them, in this startlingly original debut short-story collection

A stone appears in a woman’s pocket like a charm only to end up lodged in someone’s throat. A psychic harnesses her talent for animal communication to extract a perfect revenge. A woman goes pheasant shooting with her father-in-law and husband, switching her aim between the birds and the men. A condescending artist throws a dinner party, where he discovers a painful and consequential truth.

In these twelve exquisite and uncanny stories, the world can change in an instant. The beautiful can suddenly become grotesque, the exalted disgraced, the genius an imposter. Ranging across the globe through the worlds of art, crime and fantasy, each character turns their gaze on themselves and on each other, to confront what they see with their good eye – and their bad.

© Jess Gibson 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 Anthologies & Short Stories Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Short Stories

Critic reviews

Wise, seductive, funny, and psychedelic, The Good Eye is written in gloriously precise and tactile prose, illuminating the antechambers and edges of life—apparitions, fakes, visitations by ghosts, rodents, and stray lovers—where both threat and insight glistens. Hopeful and renegade like Joy Williams and with a sly Mona Lisa smile, Jess Gibson moves between a high-altitude view and the very muscle of life to uncover what fluorescence it might hold. This collection took my breath away. A quietly, cumulatively, supernaturally brilliant debut (Claudia Dey)
The stories in this bewitching collection begin in the known world before tilting towards mystery and rebellion - a book full of pleasure and surprise (Aysegul Savas)
The Good Eye is an astoundingly accomplished collection of stories. Unsettling, forensically observed and written in devastatingly pristine prose these stories burrowed their way under my skin and lingered there. These are modern stories imbued with a sense of timelessness (Jan Carson)
The Good Eye is a terrific collection of stories: witty, ironic, unnerving, stylish, and funny, very funny. The stories are wonderfully written but it’s Gibson’s sensibility that’s most striking. Reading The Good Eye is like going for a walk with a charming and cultivated guide who knows her way around some of the most vivid parts of Hell. It’s the best first collection of stories I’ve read in years (André Alexis)
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