This collection brings together in one distinguished volume a range of stories written over twenty-five years by this internationally acclaimed author. Janette Turner Hospital's sensuous prose reveals the inner lives of a fascinating gallery of characters caught between cultures. Some cross borders of class, gender and race, dislocated in unfamiliar and unpredictable physical worlds; others cross borders between the past and the present, blurring memory and perception in moments of crisis and illumination. 'If anything is capable of restoring your faith in the power of short fiction, this is it . . . there's no question this book marks Turner Hospital as one of the genre's finest exponents . . . Hospital's fiction reads like a quest for the perfectly cadenced sentence.' The Age 'The best of her stories are like brief cyclones wrapped around an unexpected centre of calm.' Los Angeles Times 'One of the most elegant prose styles in the business.' The Times 'Sensuous, speculative fictions about the experience of dislocation . . . Stories develop like poems or meditations.' New York Times