Janette Turner Hospital's stories have won widespread international acclaim for their dazzling style, intellectual depth and crackling energy. Her characters oscillate between estrangement and a sense of belonging, as Hospital herself has suffered geographical displacement from the deep north of Australia to the deep south of the United States.Seven of these fourteen stories were included in the 'North of Nowhere' section of Collected Stories (UQP 1995). Seven, including 'South of Loss', are published here in book form for the first time.
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
When the lives of two strangers become connected by the tragic loss of parents in a hijacked Paris-New York flight, they find themselves entangled in a web of terror, death, and betrayal.
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.
Collection of short stories by an Australian-born author who divides her time between Australia, Canada and the US. First published in Canada by McClelland and Stewart (1986), this edition includes additional stories. It was awarded the FAW Australian Natives Association Award and the Canadian Talking Book of the Year Award. Her other works include the novels TCharades' and TThe Last Magician', and a second collection of short stories, TIsobars'.
From the acclaimed author of Due Preparations for the Plague comes a powerful Australian story. Stories do insist on being told. Even the stories of hidden lives and towns and opal reefs. By cunning intention, and sometimes by discreet bribery (or other dispatch) of government surveyors, the opal-mining town Outer Maroo has kept itself off maps. And yet people do stumble into town, because the seduction of nowhere is hard to resist. two strangers reach Outer Maroo, searching for a stepdaughter and son who have mysteriously disappeared. there is a heavy, guilty feeling to the hot, parched-dry town. Mercy Given and Old Jess (everyone calls her Old Silence) watch from Ma and Bill Beresford's store. On the verandah of Bernie's Last Chance, the drinkers wait to take stock of the foreigners, before they return to their cattle properties or their sheep stations or to their stake-outs in the opal fields. Dukke Prophet crosses the street from the Living Word Gospel Hall. Young Alice Godwin whimpers. Outer Maroo. Population 87. Here two opposing cultures - the rough-diamond, boozing, fiercely individualistic bush folk and the teetotaller, church-going fundamentalists - used to coexist peaceably. Until the arrival of the cult messiah Oyster.
A brilliant and compulsively readable story of truth, lies and identity from one of Australia's finest writers. 'So then, here it is. the unadorned un-self-flattering gospel, the never-before-told story our intricately intertwined lives ... Listen: I know things that no one else knows. trust me. ' Manhattan, 1996: the trial of the Vanderbilt claimant is finally coming to an end. the case - long, complex, riven with unknowns, attracting huge media and social interest - has been seeking to establish whether or not a certain man is the son of the fabulously wealthy and well-connected Vanderbilt family. the son went missing, presumed dead, while serving in the Vietnam war. there is huge fortune, prestige and status at stake. But is the man - a handsome cattle farmer from Queensland - really the Vanderbilt heir? And if so, why does he seem so reluctant to be found? From one of our foremost novelists, the Claimant is a compelling and ravishingly readable novel about the fluid, shifting and ultimately elusive nature of identity and the reasons why people seek to change their names, their identities or their personalities. 'A genuine page turner with ... verve, fascination and mystery' ABR 'Artful, absorbing and ambitious' Sydney Morning Herald 'Daring, expansive' the Age
Reissue of a novel first published in 1985. An insurance salesman and an art curator witness the capture of illegal immigrants on the Canadian-USA border and help a woman to escape. The former strangers cross and re-cross borders - between countries, between past and present, and reality and illusion. Author holds a permanent position at the University of South Carolina as Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence. Her other books include 'The Ivory Swing', winner of Canada's Seal Award, and 'Charades', which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, the Banjo and the Adelaide Festival National Fiction Awards.
In Isobars, Janette Turner Hospital presents fifteen stories of lives precariously balanced between the past and the present, between the real and the imagined, between the steamy tropical rain forests and beaches of Australia and the urban landscapes of North American cities. The title story is a kind of cubist meditation on violence against women, refracted through years of fragmented memories into a stunning locus of dread. Indeed, each of the stories is in its own way a fugue on the evanescence of time and distance. In “The Second Coming of Come-by-Chance,” the apocalyptic resurfacing of a submerged city during a drought prompts the reemergence of an old woman’s memory of her rape as a fledgling schoolteacher some forty years earlier. Throughout these stories the real and imaginary collide again and again under the pressures of passion, loneliness, and grief. In “The Loss of Faith,” a middle-aged professor “sees” his first wife on a New York subway the day she dies in Australia. In “A Little Night Music,” a young woman’s brief sexual encounter with a stranger on an airplane turns out to be a drug-induced fantasy—perhaps. As the consciousness of her characters clickers between Queensland and Ontario, Sydney and Manhattan, Hospital skillfully blurs the lines between the quotidian and mythic, between the real and surreal. At the haunting conclusion of “Uncle Seaborn,” a man returning to Australia after the death of his parents finds himself drawn by a talisman coin and an almost atavistic longing to a mysterious rendezvous in the sea. And in the chilling piece “Queen on Pentacles, Nine of Swords,” the Tarot is the means by which a fortune-teller’s life becomes entangled with that of a brilliantly doomed Indian woman. Yet even the most somber stories pulls back at the edge of despair, and there are moments of dazzling illumination, tenderness, and transcendence. In “I Saw Three Ships,” an alcoholic veteran haunted by a friend’s death in World War II seeks redemption through a “visitation” by a young woman he meets on the beach, and comes close to self-forgiveness in a final heart-wrenching tableau of misunderstanding. Profound, compassionate, powerful, these stories explore the outermost boundaries of emotion. Isobars reaffirms Janette Turner Hospital’s status as one of the preeminent writers of contemporary fiction.
FORECAST TURBULENCE is a breathtaking and exquisitely lyrical collection of nine short stories and one memoir piece from internationally acclaimed Australian author Janette Turner Hospital. Featuring a compelling and enigmatic cast of characters
In this powerful and achingly beautiful novel, Janette Turner Hospital tackles head-on questions of national security, art, terrorism and love. From the moment Leela’s ear catches the first few bars of music in between the roar of subway trains, she’s entranced by its haunting beauty. Letting the music reel her in, in perfect fifths, it’s at the end of the inbound platform that she finds Mishka Bartok, singing Che farò senza Euridice and accompanying himself on the violin. He’s surrounded by a cluster of commuters, but hardly seems to notice they are there until he stops playing. Despite Mishka’s reluctance to talk, Leela discovers that he’s a graduate student at Harvard, studying composition. She’s a mathematician at MIT, researching the math of music. Their connection is immediate, and that night they embark on a steamy love affair. Living together in Boston, Leela and Mishka pursue their mutual passions — both academic and carnal — in a fog, as if the outside world does not exist. They have both distanced themselves from their families — Mishka from his mother and grandparents in Australia, Leela from her father and sister back in Promised Land, South Carolina. Both recoil from the reality of the city streets, where terrorists attack American civilians and a subway bombing under Harvard Square comes dangerously close to tearing their world apart. But that is ultimately the effect of the bombing, when Leela is grabbed off the street, thrust into a dark car, and taken to an interrogation room. There, she is questioned about the recent attacks by a masked man who tells her he’s a member of a private security force. He also asks directly about Mishka — who often visits an Arab café and a mosque that are under surveillance, and socializes with known instigators… all signs that he’s a terrorist, or at least aiding those responsible for the subway bombing. When Leela’s captor removes his mask at last, Cobb stands before her: the person she was perhaps closest to as a teenager back in Promised Land. Since leaving the army, after a long stint in the Middle East, he’s been involved in paramilitary work. Cobb knows from experience that photographs can be disastrously misinterpreted, but in his eyes, Mishka is guilty. Against her instincts, Leela thinks back to Mishka’s many unexplained disappearances, often around the time of such attacks. It’s then that she realizes the mystery and intensity at the heart of their relationship could be hiding much more than she’d thought. Mishka disappears again the next day, and doubt erodes Leela’s love as she embarks on her own investigation to find him and unravel the mystery of his life. Little does she know that her search will lead her across the globe and into an underworld of kidnapping, torture and despair. With this compelling re-imagining of the Orpheus story, Janette Turner Hospital again shows her genius, interweaving a literary thriller with a story of passion and the triumph of decency in confusing and dangerous times. It is at once a love story on a grand scale that spans America, Australia and the Middle East, and an exploration of how ghastly side effects of terrorism can wreak havoc on individual lives.
This vibrant, superbly crafted novel explores the elusive boundaries between existence and imagination, memory and truth. From the subtropical lushness of Queensland's Tamborine rainforest to the claustrophobic bedroom of a Boston physicist, Hospital's characters breathe an atmosphere of passion and suspense. Charade Ryan, an enigmatic story-spinning scheherazade, searches for a way to unravel the long-hold secrets of her family origins.
Sara Jeannette Duncan’s classic portrait of a turn-of-the-century Ontario town, The Imperialist captures the spirit of an emergent nation through the example of two young dreamers. Impassioned by “the Imperialist idea,” Lorne Murchison rests his bid for office on his vision of a rejuvenated British Empire. His sister Advena betrays a kindred attraction to the high-flown ideals in her love for an unworldly, and unavailable, young minister. Nimbly alternating between politics and romance, Duncan constructs a superbly ironic object-lesson in the Canadian virtue of compromise. Sympathetic, humorous, and wonderfully detailed, The Imperialist is an astute analysis of the paradoxes of Canadian nationhood, as relevant today as when the novel was first published in 1904.
This vibrant, superbly crafted novel explores the elusive boundaries between existence and imagination, memory and truth. From the subtropical lushness of Queensland's Tamborine rainforest to the claustrophobic bedroom of a Boston physicist, Hospital's characters breathe an atmosphere of passion and suspense. Charade Ryan, an enigmatic story-spinning scheherazade, searches for a way to unravel the long-hold secrets of her family origins.
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