A man working at the American Embassy in Paris repatriates the bodies of tourists. A journalist profiles an indigenous tribe who valorise fear and revile bravery. A woman suspects her brother’s new girlfriend of pretending to be colourblind. Unusual cast members populate Camille Bordas’s first collection of stories, which follows two novels in French and two in English. The tales, many of which originally appeared in the New Yorker, are complex and meticulously constructed.

Bordas gives her characters a range of ages, genders and neuroses. Many are anxious overthinkers; several are hypochondriacs. In ‘Most Die Young’, the narrator has a ‘pathological fear of everything’; in ‘Offside Constantly’, the protagonist suffers unexplained fits of narcolepsy. In the title story, a father analyses his young son’s drawings for signs of trauma – more than one sun, we are told, is a bad sign. Maladies and anxieties lead to strange events, with surprising consequences. One story opens with a group of friends celebrating a woman’s cancer remission, turns into a dinner-table debate on conspiracy theory and ends on a Hollywood shoot of an apocalyptic action film.

In a 2024 interview in the Chicago Review of Books, Bordas linked her tendency to ‘look at things from a weird angle’ to being the last of four siblings. One Sun Only has a recurrent concern with family constellations, particularly fraught sibling relationships. Brothers and sisters, like sons and daughters,