Not surprisingly, if we are to believe the social scientists, almost all of her protagonists are concerned with sex and/or male–female relationships. This preoccupation is strikingly established in the first, somewhat longer, story ‘by’ a self-described forty-three-year-old virgin, Gloria Jones, who teaches French in a girls’ school. Gloria is no cliché. She envisions herself as ‘a rose-hip on a branch, tight and firm and yellowish-brown, contented. Slender, slim, thin …’ There is even a man who wants to marry her, the father of one of her former pupils. He claims to be a writer, but is more visibly a hunter and collector, who shoots rabbits as well as the eponymous fox whose corpse Gloria is invited to view. He even offers to shoot some more foxes and to give her a coat made from their fur. Gloria is not much tempted by the fox coat, but knows she may take the relationship further. ‘Shall I walk … in the borrowed pelts of a dead animal?’ she wonders. ‘Perhaps I will.’

In time she does agree to become the third Mrs John Malcolm Crape Pembroke, and goes to live in a tower in the high country that is his home. It is not that she was desperate to marry, but who would not be seduced by the future that Malcolm spelled out for her: fine wines, good food, overseas trips, galleries, music, plays, restaurants, and her own richly furnished bedroom?

The faint hint of menace suggested by the hunting theme pervades Gloria’s life in the tower, making her alert but not afraid. On their wedding night, after a ceremony in a gazebo, followed by a lengthy feast to the accompaniment of harpsichord, recorders, and a viola da gamba, Malcolm tells Gloria what kind of writing sustains his sumptuous way of life: one volume of pornography a year, printed on his own press in the basement, illustrated with woodcuts and etchings, and selling for $5000 per copy. His honesty disarms her. Indeed, he is so open with her that she finds herself waiting for him to tell her what she may not do. Only then, she feels, when she has defied a prohibition, will his story become hers too.

Menace, nastiness, sex, and voluptés of all kinds turn out to be frequent motifs in this collection, always elaborated with a great deal of cleverness. ‘Shooting the Fox’ is a brilliant example of the many clever, nasty stories, but one must wait until the very end to find an example that is clever and nice. ‘Epistles from Eden’ is a one-off, imaginative, playful, and slyly double-edged story written in epistolary form by a woman called Sirimenet, who has come to live in Australia with her husband, Nazlyn, and their two children. The names sound Middle Eastern, yet their native land is described as pure, cold, and white; Nazlyn is an ambassador, sent to a ‘planned capital, a willed city, the site chosen’ – yet called Eden and situated not on a lake but on Twofold Bay. Its architecture is certainly unlike Canberra’s, being devised by the wife of the man who was awarded a prize for its design, and consequently full of breast-like cupolas, delicate lines, narrow canals, and pools of water.

This new, if urban, Eden is minutely described in Sirimenet’s letters to her mother, which eulogise the idealistic education system (the emphasis is on each child ‘finding where his skills and proclivities lie’), the benign government that has ‘avoided much in the way of bureaucracy … paying no attention to a military’, and the thriving arts community highly appreciative of the flourishing theatre, music, and art scenes, but also delighting in putting on impromptu performances themselves.

Things get a little closer to the bone with Sirimenet’s account of the political situation (four-yearly elections and a party dedicated to ‘keep[ing] the bastards honest’), but veer away again when we read of a prime minister who keeps open house every other Tuesday, plying his guests with wine and nibbles in exchange for their opinions about – well, anything really – even ‘a new book of poems’. (He is a poet himself.) It is a paradise entirely free of negatives until the last paragraph when, in a mysterious and unsettling turn, Sirimenet exhorts her mother always to believe that all will be well with life in Eden – and not to believe anything she may hear. Could it be that Australia is not, after all, the Lucky Country? Perish the thought – but bring on more stories, Ms Halligan, in this wickedly tongue-in-cheek style.