Such moments of humour form a perfect counterbalance to the more serious content found in these six long stories from veteran Canberra writer John Clanchy. Each story becomes a small world for the reader as we slip effortlessly into the mindof the narrator. Clanchy manages to create complex characters and relationships in only a few pages and then develops these as the stories progress, offering surprise and poignancy. ‘Daddy’s Girl’ is a particularly moving story in which a couple become distant from each other as they mourn their daughter, each finding others to connect with instead of their partner. In ‘House of Cards’, on the other hand, the protagonist Larissa discovers as an adult the unexpected ways her parents loved each other and reinterprets her childhood memories as she does so.

This is a collection of stories about transformational moments and how they affect us, about the choices we make and our desire for, and fear of, intimacy. Expertly told, without a false note, they linger in the mind. What will happen to Pete Davis, a police officer spending the night guarding the scene of a crime in ‘Vigil’, when the choices he made come home to roost? And what about the googling postie whose secret may just have been blown wide open? Read and find out.