Cirrus@Austlit

'In The Best Australian Stories 2014, Patrick White Award–winning author Amanda Lohrey selects the outstanding short fiction of the year. Sometimes fantastical, sometimes raw, and always a ‘shot of adrenaline to the mind and heart’, this collection features exciting new voices alongside the established and admired.'

'The edges of reality blur in a corporate lawyer’s tale of working in a 1200-storey glass tower. A prized coffee table becomes the focus of a father’s anxieties and frustrations. Tense and fractured lines of communication shape the life of an interpreter on Christmas Island. Imaginative, remarkable, intimate – this unmissable anthology celebrates the art of consummate storytelling.' (Source: Publisher's Blurb)

'A writer questions the architecture of words, struggling to capture his ideas before they are lost; a husband excavating beneath his house becomes mesmerised by silence and disappears in search of solitude; a lighthouse keeper dreams that he is a man dreaming that he is the keeper of a lighthouse.

'Magnificent in its scope and imagery, David Brooks's mastery of the written word is eclipsed in this thought-provoking collection. Both evocative and experimental, Brooks's stories conjure fragments of memory and time, capturing streetscapes and heartscapes in a mosaic-style splendour.

'Lyrical and perceptive, brave and illuminating, Napoleon's Roads explores the richness of language and the possibilities of expression, while exemplifying some of the most sophisticated, polished and beautiful contemporary literature in Australia today.' (Publication summary)