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North of Nowhere, South of Loss

short story collection

These internationally-acclaimed stories chart the author's nomadic trajectory from Deep North Australia to America's Deep South.

In these prize-winning 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.

"Hospital goes from strength to literary strength ever brilliant in ideas, graceful in expression, resourceful in story."
   — Fay Weldon

"Her stories are like brief cyclones wrapped around an unexpected center of calm."
   — Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Turner Hospital has a rich, allusive style and a gift for intensity which etches the geography of her characters' inner lives as sharply as it does the cities, towns and climates in which they live."
   — Sandra Hall, The Bulletin

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PURCHASE THIS BOOK FROM AMAZON: Canada | France | UK | US
Australian readers purchase online from the University of Queensland Bookshop

PUBLICATION HISTORY
Australia University of Queensland Press, 2003
Canada Fourth Estate/ Harper Collins, 2003
UK Fourth Estate/ Harper Collins, 2004
USA W.W. Norton, 2003

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