North of Nowhere South of Loss

In these prize-winning heartbreakingly nuanced (Speakeasy) stories Janette Turner Hospital explores the infinite incarnations of loss; lovers meeting again in midlife re-experience through the memory of photographs both real and imagined the passion that both frightened and thrilled them; a young dental hygienist adrift living in a hostel in northern Australia receives a heart-wrenching visit from her drug-dependent brother; a mother and adolescent daughter move into a new house and their sense of safety is shaken when the previous owner reappears desperate to reclaim what he has lost. Hospital's characters oscillate between estrangement and intense connectedness between a permanent sense of dislocation and a yearning to belong.