Gillian Mears is a courageous and strikingly original storyteller who has twice won Commonwealth Writers' regional awards, as well as the coveted Vogel Award. Her early stories chronicle life in small country towns. Their raw atmosphere of grief and sadness is alleviated by Mears' consistently unconventional sense of the comic. The later stories use a wider lens, introducing a shift in sexual orientation and presenting different angles on the country town, along with locales in Africa, France and England.