Rolling Stone

In the title story of A Song for Wildcats, two young men, Felix and Alfie, take a boat to go birdwatching at an archipelago just off the coast of Corsica. Having spent the afternoon together in a lush floral landscape, the near strangers settle onto the rocky shore to share a spliff and embark on a ponderous discussion about the nature of love.

With his legs drawn up and his elbows propped on his knees, Felix contemplates. “I think love is like kindness,” he says, “like how you can carry out an act that embodies kindness without it genuinely coming from a place of empathy and altruism. Maybe it’s, you know, ego using an act of kindness as a vehicle to satisfy itself.” Alfie, the narrator, responds, “I had love back at school.” Then he describes it as feeling “like someone knew where all the bruises were and how hard to press.”

This heartbreaking combination of the visceral and the emotional is the hallmark of Caitlin Galway’s first collection of...