Cirrus@Austlit

'These are arresting stories that cast a spotlight on the borderlands of black and white, desire and fate, life and death. A six-year-old Aboriginal girl, dumb and abused and deceased, yearns for her mother’s touch. The illiterate hangman of Ned Kelly wants to do his first job ‘good’. A blind translator disembarks at a desert town to decipher a curse that is killing language. The commander of HMS Antaeus sails with the shades of Ulysses and the poets Dante and Virgil to claim Mt Purgatory for King and Country. The same-named son of his same-named father is called to assume his birth right at the scene of a railroad accident. After countless lifetimes of conflict, an aspirant surrenders, and a leaf falls.

'Within these 12 fictions, 74 people perish, while the demise of hundreds, or thousands, of others is inferred. But they are far from being morbid meditations. With ethos, pathos and humour, Giacometti’s characters illuminate their ignorant Fate, or attempt to transcend it.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.