Mortality provides fecund ground for creative possibility; unsurprisingly, many other contributors ‘pick their moment’ in impending death. Robert Drewe, Dorothy Johnston, Brooke Dunnell, and Brenda Walker, among others, offer stories that trace moments preceding death or, at least, the threat thereof, whether due to old age, disease, or violence. The protagonist in Drewe’s ‘The Lap Pool’ is a wealthy man facing court proceedings for white-collar crime whose only solace is swimming in his private lap pool. The comforting rhythms of backstroke remind us of Tim Winton, but Drewe’s protagonist is an outsider for very different reasons from most Winton characters. Drewe, no stranger to water, provides a superb portrait that has more in common with John Cheever’s classic ‘The Swimmer’, a story perhaps not coincidentally cited by Falconer in her introduction. Johnston, Dunnell, and Walker all have characters who are dealing with advanced age and diminishing or usurped powers. Johnston’s protagonist plots revenge; Dunnell’s Mal might have come from Grumpy Old Men (when a GP tells him how to negotiate a chair, he snaps: ‘I’ve been getting in and out of chairs for a hundred years. I think I’ve got it pretty right’); and Walker, in a few pages, traces a thread from childhood to age, illness, and death in a simple but affecting story that closes the anthology.

A number of stories deal with death’s aftermath. A superb example – indeed, one of the finest offerings in the anthology – is Gerard Windsor’s ‘And After Death the Judgement’. When her husband Philip dies, Alice commences an intermittent correspondence with an English woman whom Philip had described as ‘an old flame’, and, in turn, with the woman’s husband. Windsor eschews the histrionics of post-funeral revelation, but Alice comes to discern ‘Another Philip that she hadn’t known’. In this formal, almost old-fashioned, beautifully told story, Windsor’s delicately drawn protagonist attempts to read between the lines – of letters she receives and writes, and of the known facts about her late husband.

In ‘The Meaning of Life’, Mandy Sayer offers a similarly refined portrait of vulnerability in the wake of death, with an undertaker wracked by grief upon the passing of his wife. Sayer carefully delineates the changed relationship between the undertaker and his young daughter, and in the process provides an interesting excursion into the mortuary. Dead bodies also figure in a story by Michael Sala, while Steven Amsterdam and Kim Scott negotiate very different landscapes that have been disturbed by widespread destruction and death. Eva Hornung’s ‘Life Sentence’, written from the point of view of a caged cockatoo, takes flight with the wit and pathos of its parrot phrases.

Given mortality’s ample coverage, it might be tempting to regard this as a grim gathering of the dead. Falconer notes in her introduction that some critics found her 2008 selections humourless. Despite the prevalence of ageing and death – and death can, of course, itself be funny – there are a number of humorous stories in this book, notably Karen Hitchcock’s marvellously absurd ‘In Formation’, in which a woman tells of her husband’s training to become a Lacanian psychoanalyst. She learns that ‘Lacanian psychoanalysts are exactly like Freudian psychoanalysts, but with minor renovations’, and she goes to dinner parties where everyone wears black and ‘says “Yes?” at the end of their sentences with an upward inflection’. As her husband becomes increasingly steeped in his new learning, hums atonally and intones gems such as ‘There is no such thing as Woman’, the narrator strikes up a close relationship with a plastic Freud doll, with which, or with whom, she goes shopping, listens to jazz and discusses the work of Juan Davila. Sex and death at its riotous best.

The parent–narrator in Jo Case’s ‘Hell Is Other Parents’ takes well-judged aim at another parent with an excessive need to control children’s behaviour, while the narrator’s own child, Felix, inspired by meeting literary heroes Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton at a book signing (‘Felix shows all the signs of growing up to become one of those really annoying people at writers’ festivals … The ones who want to make a statement instead of asking a question’), wreaks delightful havoc. Tim Richards’s ‘Club Selection’ alternates between light and dark in its dystopian view of the future, its depiction of some migrants’ desperate efforts to assimilate, and its scathing portrayal of what it means to be Australian. D.B.C. Pierre’s ‘Suddenly Doctor Cox’ displays wit and poignancy in its rendering of self-styled ‘living legend’ Cox. Set in Trinidad, Pierre’s skilful description comes to us via a Nick Carraway-like narrator, self-effacing – despite a workplace setting, we never learn the narrator’s occupation – but more than vivid enough to capture essential characteristics, situations, and settings. With its butterflies and bougainvilleas, its humidity, music and ethnic mix, and above all its sad and idiosyncratic main character, Pierre’s story brings post-colonial Trinidad to life with startling clarity.

Any anthology of the ‘best’ is by nature eclectic. Not all stories here deal with the broad themes and voices cited above. As with the subject matter, the quality of stories varies. Both John Connell and Lucy Neave capture the rituals of helping farm animals give birth, but Neave’s telling, overburdened with bovine adjectives (both a newborn calf and the narrator’s partner have ‘liquid eyes’, the partner further blessed with a ‘smoky tongue’ and ‘cushiony lips’), can evoke labour in unintended ways. Cate Kennedy is not at her best with a didactic story about the creation of a ‘culturally diverse’ mural. Critiquing the disjunction between government-sponsored ‘community art’ and what a community might actually engage with makes for a worthy, essay-like argument, but in this instance some of Kennedy’s characters, like those in the mural, lack dimension. On the other hand, Tara June Winch creates a taut and understatedly tense ménage à trois on board a boat when the young narrator is hired as a deckhand by a troubled husband and wife, a couple who ‘had depression tuck them into their wedding bed’. Marion Halligan’s sketch of Internet dating moves deftly from humour to menace, demonstrating how in the online world we can post multiple personae and make ‘others’ of ourselves.

These elegant stories follow traditional paths in their narrative techniques. Falconer has read exhaustively to achieve a selection of high quality. Even the weaker stories are engaging, and the strongest may warrant anthologising beyond this compelling volume.