THE HIGH PLACES

The dazzling stories in this collection find those moments when people confront the strangeness and mystery of their lives. The revelations of old friends on holiday. An accident on a dark country road. A marine biologist in conversation with the ghost of Charles Darwin. The sudden arrival of American parachutists in a remote Australian town. A lottery win. A farmer troubled by miracles in the middle of a drought… The people in The High Places are jolted into seeing themselves from fresh and often disconcerting perspectives.

Ranging around the world from a remote Pacific island to outback Australia to the tourist haunts of Greece, these stories are written with extraordinary invention, great emotional insight, and wry humour.

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE

'[T]he stories in The High Places are imaginative, playful, and intellectually sophisticated . . . Highly assured, comic but kind, an effervescent admixture of fable, magic realism, and irony . . . Remarkable.'
Australian Book Review