The characters in these stories – lost, frightened things – are far from perfect. The young, unnamed Australian woman in the final sequence, ‘The Leopard’, flees to India, seeking spiritual solace in Buddhist and Christian monasteries, chasing large and dangerous jungle cats, and playfully teasing out her status as the only white person in this exotic new place. Jed Harp, in ‘Ground’, remembers his friend Daniel Hess; their youth spent producing graffiti in urban areas as part of the amusingly innocent-sounding gang, TAC, or Teen Age Crime; and the beginning of Jed’s transformation from street scrawler to artist. ‘Working on their graf they were lively, serious, spurring on each other’s efforts at complex letter forms, characters and vibrant colour combinations. Man, that burns, they’d say, encouraging the dynamic aggression of raw letter styling ... Intent and focused, smoking and chillin’ ...’

Huon, with due curiosity and self-awareness, deftly addresses Indian post-colonial realities in ‘The Leopard’. Her prose is smooth and understated; her characters deep and thoughtful individuals, confused but never succumbing to their confusion. To Huon’s credit, it is impossible to define them in a sentence.