O: Volume One

Last year I sat down with a pen and started drawing women. O.

Thirty-four ink portraits in all, every one of them caught in private, every one a stranger I'd somehow already met.

So I asked the women who read my books to name them, and to tell me who she was before the ink met her skin.

This volume is the first eight. Eight sapphic stories about women in the unguarded moment they stop managing their desire, and find themselves gloriously alive.

I drew them. You named them. They did the rest.

Volume One of four.

INSIDE VOLUME ONE

Shannon. Eleven years anchoring the network's late bulletin, and five Tuesdays now of leaving the side door unlocked at 10:45 for an extern she has run out of language to call a colleague.

Adeline. Newly arrived principal of a girls' boarding school six thousand feet above the Garhwal valley in 1920s India, undone in lamplight by a slim volume of Sappho left on her desk without a note.

Sienna. A US combat medic at 02:00 in a desert shower block after a medevac that nearly cost her crew, and the Black Hawk pilot who flew them out.

Bailey. A half-Thai chef thirty floors above Bangkok, and the French sous-chef she hired knowing exactly what she was doing.

Rebecca. Afternoon office hours that stopped being office hours weeks ago. A constitutional law professor with an analytical streak, and a student who would do anything she asked.

Rowan. A converted cannery on a Pacific Northwest island, a single mother who has not let herself want anyone in six years, and the non-binary produce driver who arrives every Thursday on the eleven-fifteen ferry.

Vivienne. A Berlin ophthalmologist in a marriage of parallel schedules, and the sculptor whose face she held in her hands in the dark.

Valentina. A New Orleans bar owner who has spent seven years giving people the wanting and keeping the thing itself, until a guitar player from Frenchmen Street walked in and looked away first.

O: Volume One is the first of four illustrated sapphic anthologies from bestselling author Ruby Scott. There are twenty-six more women waiting.

If you have read the Awakening of Desire series and wanted to know what Ruby Scott can do in shorter form, O is the answer.