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‘Pitch perfect. Subtly powerful stories that ring hauntingly true.'- Steven Carroll, Winner of the Miles Franklin Award In this luminous book of new stories, John Kinsella drops us seamlessly into the worlds of men, women and children at pivotal moments in their lives. In the title story, a husband who has lost his wife plans to destroy the old-growth bush she loved and escape to the city, with alarming consequences. Elsewhere, racism at a small town supermarket is resisted through friendship; in an act of kindness a frightening stranger turns up in a family's woodshed; a home-made telephone transmits a dark truth; a theatre director is seduced into the world of an obsessive rabbit trapper; and two sisters find their lives thrown out of kilter by a charismatic junkie. This is a book of city and country, of challenge and threat, of sobriety and loss of control, but also of hope and beauty. Wandoos hold ‘the sunset cold and warm at once in their powdery barks'as Kinsella captures the intensity of place, and the complexities and strangeness of human behaviour with wonder and pathos.

The last bushrangers in Australian history, James and Patrick Kenniff, were at the height at their horse thieving operation at turn of the 20th century. In One, troops cannot pull the Kenniff Gang out of the ranges and plains of Western Queensland – the brothers know the terrain too well, and the locals are sympathetic to their escapades. When a policeman and a station manager go out on patrol from tiny Upper Warrego Station and disappear, Sergeant Nixon makes it his mission to pursue the gang, especially, Jim Kenniff, who becomes for him an emblem of the violence that resides in the heart of the country. From the award-winning author of The Mary Smokes Boys, One is a novel of minimalist lyrical beauty that traverses the intersections between violence and love. It asks what right one man has to impose his will on another, and whether the written law can ever answer the law of the heart?

Hauntingly beautiful and told with remarkable clarity, Over the Water is the story of an Australian outsider who finds teaching work in Bandung, a city in Java. Seduced by the sights, sounds, and magic of Indonesia, Joe finds himself unwittingly drawn into the lives of three women. Firstly he rents a room in fellow teacher Lisa's house, and discovers that she has a small harem of Indonesian boys living with her. Then there is Danu, a Javanese beauty, who says she is trying to escape an arranged marriage. Danu and Joe find common ground in seeking aspects of themselves ‘over the water'– for Danu this means the West, for Joe it means the East. Joe also feels a connection with Babette, a reclusive English woman who lives in a crumbling Dutch villa. She is an old friend of Joe's elder brother, Emile, who once lived in Bandung. Her relationship with Emile has long ceased, but Joe makes a remarkable discovery. As Over the Water unfolds, Joe discovers that his identity is not only fragile, it is disturbingly arbitrary. Based at least in part on the author's experiences of living in Indonesia, this compelling debut is the quintessential novel about East and West, and how our dreams manifest themselves.'A kind of Wake in Fright set in Indonesia, Lane paints an unsentimental portrait of wanderlust and the perils of freedom. But he doesn't stop there. With hallucinatory vision, he draws back the curtains to reveal the inevitable pull and power of a mythic undertow.'Courtney Collins, author of The Burial.

The coast and dreams of being by the water are never far away in Kinsella's surprising stories of Australian small town life. They summon in us both longing and fear at the recollection of our own childhoods, families, friends and upbringings. Flight is a possibility. A boy builds a rocket from 44-gallon drums and packing cases, a lone farmer travels to London to glimpse the snow his late mother once spoke of, inseparable mates relocate to the inner city. But the elemental mystery of place, of the country, of the sea, invariably draws them back.