A collection of stories about people out of place: geographically, emotionally, politically, linguistically, spiritually.

Hospital is very good at that particular condition where a life appears to be continuing normally, while underneath it some fundamental coordinate has slipped. Homesickness, migration, estrangement, childhood damage, desire, memory, violence; all of these having a long afterlife within these stories, like fault lines in a house. 

These are stories about dislocated people, but also dislocated narratives: lives that do not quite sit where they are supposed to, voices that arrive from elsewhere, pasts that keep interrupting the present.

A strong one for readers of Australian literary fiction, short stories, diasporic writing, Barbara Hanrahan, Elizabeth Jolley, Mavis Gallant, and fiction about people who have technically arrived somewhere but remain profoundly elsewhere.

Paperback. This copy is a later Australian reprint from UQP. Good second-hand condition, with light shelfwear and some age toning to pages.