Cirrus@Austlit

'Reaching across continents, these allusive, richly textured stories are unified by moments of dislocation in which certainties are eclipsed by unfamiliar terrain. A last, transforming embrace between Indian lovers heralds their separate journeys into arranged marriages; an elderly woman discovers a kinship with her neighbour through their mutual isolation; a young woman's beauty is ravaged by fire; a schoolteacher, fettered by responsibility, learns from her brash students during a Queensland summer heady with the smell of sugar cane; a decaying amaryllis plant mirrors the pain of the artist who obsessively sketches it, and a woman devastated by her friend's death, is shocked by her own secret exultation in living.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Virago ed.)

'Trisha Kent, by inheritance a silent partner in a Queensland (Australia) furniture firm owned by distant relatives-by-marriage, leaves Melbourne to meet the family she's never seen, and to decide how she should vote in a proposed takeover. Awaiting her in Queensland: a brace of brothers at the firm's helm; the firm's attractive accountant, who'll teach Trisha to ride horseback, and then some; a paraplegic craftsman, as bitter as his wife is loving; and the aggrieved wife of Cousin Julian–who had not only dipped into the till and skipped off for distant parts, but had actually tried to murder his spouse. Before the sort-out, there'll be a murder and an attempted one, arson, a gun-barrel confrontation and the work of an exceptional mare who earns her oats.'

Source: Kirkus Reviews.