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.

"Captured imagery, restless single women, backward glances recur in these highly accomplished stories, which are spliced together without visible joins. Hospital ... is a mistress of the interior landscape and the subtly modulated private perspective."

Janette Turner Hospital received Australia's Patrick White Award for lifetime literary achievement, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina.