Francesca Sasnaitis

On the Blue Train is Kristel Thornell’s reimagining of Agatha Christie’s mysterious disappearance in 1926. Thornell might have let her imagination fly, given that both Dorothy ...

Like any good storyteller, Christopher Heathcote begins by setting the scene: ‘one of those scruffy unpaved streets on the outer fringe’ of Melbourne on a wintry day in 1956 ...

Life, one of Commonwealth's minor characters remarks, is a series of losses. Teresa Cousins acknowledges that life is also other, better things, but that it is the losses that define us ...

Brian Stoddart is a scholar and expert in the history of modern India, with sixteen works of non-fiction to his credit. His first novel, A Madras Miasma, is set soon after World War I. The body of an Englishwoman is found with her head buried in the rancid mud of the Buckingham Canal, behind Chepak Palace. Superintendent Christian Jolyon Brenton Le Fanu, head of the recently formed Madras City Crime Unit, and his Muslim sidekick, Sergeant Mohammad Habibullah, must solve the case as quickly as possible. They are hampered by the teeming and uncooperative population of the riverbanks, political unrest, the disquiet of the British ruling class, and, to top things off, the truculent Commissioner of Police Arthur Jepson, who is determined to ‘take [Le Fanu] out’.

Anyone who has lived in Sydney’s inner west will recognise the terrain of Springtime: gardens redolent of mystery and decay, shabbiness, unexpected vistas, and streets that Michelle de Kretser describes as running ‘everywhere like something spilled’.

Frances has moved to Sydney with Charlie, who has left his wife and son Luke behind in Melbourne. Luke’s occasional visits fuel Frances’s uncertainty with intimations of a shared family history from which she feels excluded. She walks Rod, the timid dog she rescued from the pound, and muses on the vagaries of her situation, her fears and failings.

You are perfect for this story. I will never meet you.’ We are invited into Australian Love Stories and into Bruce Pascoe’s erotic reverie with this line from ‘Dawn’. The reader is embraced, as the luxuriating eye of Pascoe’s narrator embraces the recumbent body of the woman beside him. His gaze is illicit, touch forbidden. We are privileged voyeurs, given temporary access to hidden thoughts and lives. Love. This paltry word hardly describes the myriad guises of friendship, affection, homosexual and heterosexual relationship, desire, lust, loneliness, and satisfaction; the gamut of emotions expressed in the twenty-nine stories editor Cate Kennedy selected from the ‘sea of stories’ she received. I do not have enough room here to mention each singular invocation of love by name. Some stories follow the constraints of realism, others are more expressionistic, but each holds a gift – a kernel of some essential truth about the human condition. The ones I mention simply struck a special chord for me.

Who killed Sarah Compton? She was a ‘prying old busybody’, but surely that isn’t an adequate motive for murder? When her grisly corpse is found on the restroom floor of the Melbourne Telephone Exchange, there is no lack of suspects. Could Gerda MacIntyre, the girl with the ‘tragic eyes’, be capable of such a heinous crime? What is silly, pretty Gloria Patterson hiding? Is the attractive John Clarkson too good to be true? Will Detective- Sergeant Matheson prove to be the better man? And will our plucky heroine Margaret ‘Maggie’ Byrnes uncover the murderer before he, or she, strikes again?