Australian writer Margo Lanagan’s short stories create a sense of displacement as readers navigate unsettling geographic and emotional terrain. Lanagan is a master at blending the familiar with the extraordinary, and from the friction between the two she not only weaves arresting stories but also invites challenging questions about nature and human nature. The toy figures of a child’s war game come to life, casting a pall of sleep over all but a single boy who acts as midwife as a queen gives birth, and is left with the baby she leaves behind with a return to battle. An adolescent monkey mourns her ailing tribal leader. With his death comes violence and violation as males vy for dominance, and then instinctual appreciation for the victor. A clinging girl has been cast out by her mother to spend the night with another family. She fears a man who walks the night and in trying to get home again is caught. Her rescue is born of a mother’s love and the knowledge of women, which she now shares without full comprehension. The soul of a bird returns with a cloak of its earthly form in order to save a teenage girl who has alighted down a dark and dangerous path. In ten remarkable stories, Lanagan offers hard and harsh realities pierced by moments of tenderness that not only sustain a sense of the worth of it all, but define it. (Age 15 and older)

Margo Lanagan's electrifying stories take place in worlds not quite our own, and yet each one illuminates what it is to be human. They are stories of yearning for more, and learning to live with what you have. Stories that show the imprint love leaves on us all.

If you think you don't like short fiction, that a story can't have the depth or impact of a novel, then you haven't read Margo Lanagan. A writer this startling and this original doesn't come along very often. So for anyone who likes to be surprised, touched, unsettled, intrigued, or scared senseless, prepare to be dazzled by what a master storyteller can do in a few short pages.