Author(s): Josephine Rowe

Australian

This collection announces the arrival of an exciting new talent in Australian fiction. In short vignettes and longer stories, Josephine Rowe explores the idea of things that are left behind: souvenirs and scars, or memories, values and prejudice. A mother drives north to Brisbane with her young sons, who watch her and try to decipher her buried grief; two photographers document a nation's guilt in pictures of its people's hands; in Western Australia an underground club plays jazz to nostalgic patrons dreaming of America's deep south; a young woman struggles to define herself among the litter of objects an old lover left behind; an artist's model aches from posing while the artist draws shipwrecked boats along the lines of her spine. Rowe captures everyday life in restrained poetic prose, exploring themes of collective memory and guilt, permanence and impermanence, and inherited beliefs.