Cirrus@Austlit

'Rosanne Dingli's stories deal with art, music, and literature, and are intensely concerned with location and atmosphere. They combine diverse meanings of intimacy experienced by a fascinating assortment of characters, at different times, in different places.

Uneasy familiarity between friends thrown together by a difficult love for one woman, or the bond of siblings, are forms of intimacy that can border on contempt. Artists, musicians and writers can have such similar intense feelings ... or such diverse emotions, about similar situations. Lovers' tenderness can endure because of deep understanding. Betrayal, confusion and joy live side-by-side with disappointment, bewilderment and elation, and always, there is that sense of involvement, of relationship.

This is an excursion into how close, or how distant, two individuals can feel. Enjoy this special bijou collection of fifteen previously published and awarded stories' (publisher blurb).

Set in various European historical settings, each of the stories in this collection plays in its own way on the theme of the relation of the individual to the sum-total of human history and geography.

'Award-winning literary fiction author Rosanne Dingli follows the success of The Astronomer’s Pig and Counting Churches – The Malta Stories with another volume. Read fourteen atmospheric stories crammed with exotic ingredients and locations, which engage and somehow ring with the familiar and the unexpected. Historical fiction, folkloric tales, and anecdotes linked strongly with their location are this author's favourite forays into storytelling. Each short story or novella has indelible links with the facts that form its base and background' (publisher's blurb).

The collection comprises all the stories published in Vision or Delusion (2010) and Over and Above (2011) - both out of print.