North of Nowhere

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. Hospitals characters oscillate between estrangement and intense connectedness, between a permanent sense of dislocation and a yearning to belong.