About the book, Narcissi: A Novel 
- Genre: Women’s Fiction / Texas Fiction
- Publisher: Winedale Publishing
- Publication Date: October 15, 2026
Ten women fall for Cole Burnett, a traveling Texas writer. He is the kind of man whose need for freedom should send lovers running in the opposite direction. But he has a lanky charisma and the gift of listening, rare enough at any time. The women he encounters in Narcissi, a novel-in-stories, find his attention compelling, and they all get hurt, or cause hurt. But hurt is never the whole story.
Each woman brings her own complicated life into her time with Cole, conflicts with husbands, traumas survived, needs postponed, children. And children grow up with questions.
Burnett understands that loneliness compels him toward the women he meets. But none of them seems to reach where the loneliness resides, where whatever’s missing pushes him to keep moving, to find a purpose for his future. Later, after the death threat, traveling becomes a way to stay alive.
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About the author, Babette Fraser Hale 
Babette Hale is the author of A Wall of Bright Dead Feathers, winner of the 2022 Troncoso Award for debut fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, and a memoir, This Familiar Heart, about her relationship with her late husband, Leon Hale.
In addition to writing fiction, she has been a magazine feature writer, columnist, book editor, publisher and part owner of a bookstore. She lives in Texas and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.
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My Thoughts 
I recently had the opportunity to interview Babette Fraser Hale for Lone Star Literary Life, and one of the first things I told her was how much I loved her use of language, which manages to be both precise and lyrical. Consider the opening of the first chapter: “Free is not exactly what Cole Burnett feels, walking away from the house. But he is certainly unencumbered.” In just two sentences, we have a sense of how Cole thinks, and even how he sounds.
“I do love a really good sentence,” Hale told me, and Narcissi is built from a whole lot of them.
We discover later that Cole, a Texas writer, writes a monthly magazine column called “Slow Travel,” which is also a fitting description of this book: a slow journey through the life and loves of a writer, beginning in 1980, with plenty of unexpected turns along the way.
But while Cole is the central character, this “novel in stories” is really about the women he encounters. Each is distinctly herself. There is no particular type, no interchangeable parade of romantic interests. Hale gives these women agency, personality, and histories of their own, while allowing us to experience Cole’s story through their eyes.
Nor does the narrative unfold like a catalogue of relationships. The interconnected stories revisit several women, linger with them, diverge, and return. It’s an elegant structure, so deftly crafted that when the novel shifts perspectives, the transition feels entirely natural.
At roughly 300 pages, Narcissi is a substantial read, but it’s also one rich with discovery. Cole gradually comes to understand his complicated relationship with intimacy and his seemingly insatiable wanderlust. The women, meanwhile, make discoveries of their own, often at stages of life when conventional fiction might suggest that reinvention is no longer possible.
And readers are invited to make discoveries, too. Perhaps the most important is that understanding why someone behaves as he does isn’t the same as absolving him of responsibility. Explanation is not excuse, and empathy needn’t erase accountability.
In another writer’s hands, Narcissi might have been merely the story of a literary man with a wandering eye and a reluctance to commit. Instead, Babette Fraser Hale flips that script, offering something far more nuanced: a deeply human exploration of longing, connection, self-discovery, and the ways we are all fallible and perfectly imperfect.
And she does it, sentence by beautiful sentence.
Goes well with: a chopped beef sandwich and a Shiner bock enjoyed at a picnic table outside the local BBQ place.
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Each of the flawed, fully human characters we meet in these twelve stories faces a moment of life-altering transformation. Most are newcomers to the scenic, rolling countryside of central Texas whose charms they romanticize, even as the troubles they hoped to leave behind persist.
Babette Fraser Hale’s fiction has won the Meyerson Award from Southwest Review, a creative artist award from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston, and been recognized among the “other distinguished stories” in Best American Short Stories, 2015. Her story “Drouth” is part of the New York Public Library’s digital collection. Her nonfiction has appeared in Texas Monthly, Houston City, and the Houston Chronicle. She writes a personal essay column for the Fayette County Record.
I love short stories. They really show off an author’s range and adaptability, and when they work, they sing in ways that novels don’t. This collection, A Wall of Bright Dead Feathers, sings in many ways.
