The series begins slowly. Gotham sees an Australian music journalist in New York to interview a young rapper, Na$ti Boi, who has agreed to talk while shopping for his ever-expanding wardrobe. Much of the action occurs in a department store, after hours. When our journalist–narrator, for whom the zenith of pop music was the Ramones and who is doing this interview purely for money, enters the store and meets Na$ti Boi, who is not so nasty but exhibits the predictable traits of misogyny, self-indulgence, and delusions of power and insight, few revelations ensue. The story strives for poignancy in a later scene in Central Park involving the narrator and Na$ti Boi's long-suffering uncle and minder, Smokey, and their respective children – an affecting, if sentimental, denouement.

Venice sees the narrator, Ryan, a recently unemployed civil engineer, co-opted as part-time carer for his sister's son, Harrison. The sister, a successful artist working in the style of Patricia Piccinini, is sculpting a humanoid family from materials including horses' heads collected from a macabre outpost on the edge of the city. For the artist, family remains abstract, despite her mania for representing it in art. While she craves a gig at the Venice Biennale, and her dentist husband, home from work, 'finds a chardonnay old enough or important enough to have a cork', the victim of the mining boom bubble, Ryan, accepts his role of uncle and carer – the archetypal, forbearing Earls character in service to others.

Vancouver compels with a story reminiscent of Bernard Malumud's The Natural (1952). In 2001, the narrator is visiting a former American footballer who stayed with his family in the 1970s when the narrator was a boy and the youthful footballer a giant whose regularly dislocating shoulder, injured during a prank, unhinged a spectacular sporting career. When the narrator's father buys and sells Poseidon shares at the right time in 1970 – mining variously gives and takes in these novellas – he capitalises on his fortune by buying rights to sell American football to the antipodes. The young giant, who can hurl a football seventy yards – provided the narrator's father shoves the shoulder back in its socket after each throw – is the uncomplaining performing freak helping sell this American dream. Boy and parents become de facto family for the giant. The footballer, also a budding writer, piques the boy's interest in literature. Decades later, the narrator is a writer – giving rise to metafictional musing on the unpublishable nature of the novella – but in the wake of 9/11, for writers and giants, as for others, the world is unsettled. In the ex-footballer, Earls captures the power and vulnerability of a man who is a giant in more ways than one.

The Wisdom Tree novellas by Nick Earls (Inkerman & Blunt)

Juneau, the fourth novella, gains its name from the hard-to-reach Alaskan capital. The narrator, Tim, another post-mining boom casualty, escorts his uncommunicative father on a journey tracing the travels of the father's long-dead great-uncle. For much of the story it remains unclear why the father, neglectful of his immediate family, is set upon knowing the fate of his ancestor, or why Tim, another Earls character lacking agency, tags along. In Juneau's museum, what became of the ancestor is revealed to be, nicely, counter to touristic myths of frontier conquest. As readers we might, nevertheless, wonder if this one was worth the journey.

The Wisdom Tree derives its title from a tree in northern Hollywood, or 'NoHo', near the famous large letters of the Hollywood sign. In a box beneath the tree people deposit poems, accounts of dreams, business cards – messages of hope both cinematic in scale and more intimate. NoHo, the last and finest of the novellas in this quintet, sees an Australian family pursuing a Tinseltown dream, and is engagingly told from the point of view of Charlie, whose sister is an aspiring child star.

Nick Earls (Candid Lane photography)The prolific Earls has often, and tellingly, written about children. Frequently likened to Nick Hornby, in NoHo Earls is, in a good way, most like Hornby here. Charlie has 'no sense there's some big space inside me where a dream should go', but he is a deadpan observer of his host city ('There's a lot of blonde hair in LA') and of his sister's obsession with One Direction's Harry Styles, who 'thanks whole cities for liking him'. He alone sees LA has a natural world: eagles ('No one here sees eagles. I've asked them. No one looks up'), sparrows and finches, 'small brown twitchy things'.

Attractively packaged by Inkerman & Blunt, The Wisdom Tree proffers its share of well-worn types. The bad dude rapper loves his mom, the ambitious yuppies are self-serving, the giant is gentle. But Earls nimbly and non-judgementally portrays driven characters and forgiving families. Those characters often wait a long time for doors to open. Sometimes the reader does too. But as NoHo shows, going the distance can bring rewards, if in unexpected ways.