It is a doleful tone shared by many of the other twenty- five stories in this impressive collection. There is, for in- stance, the ravelled sadness of mother–daughter relations in Isabelle Li’s ‘As Green as Blue’, where a young Chinese girl eventually discovers a few family secrets; there is the isolating misery of a father’s dementia in Anna Krien’s ‘Turning off the Lights’; and, above all, there is the stark loneliness of everyday life, exquisitely captured in Claire Aman’s ‘Jap Floral’. As with most anthologies of this sort, the stories are done by divers hands, old and new, in a variety of styles and narrative voices. Yet it is remarkable how many of them seem to draw their inspiration from the inexhaustible wellsprings of human unhappiness. Grief, anxiety, resentment, despair – all these raw emotions are here in spades. Even the more light-hearted contributions, such as the family mouse-hunt in Rudi Soman’s ‘Crackers’, seem sad-edged. Of course, this might simply be an effect of reading the book at such an uncertain time, in the wake of worldwide credit crunches and monetary meltdowns. In the midst of every economic slump it would seem, there is a bull market for melancholia.

This is the eighth annual round-up of short fiction from Black Inc. Delia Falconer writes in her introduction that the stories in the present volume have been chosen for their capacity to surprise. This seems a sound principle: fiction in its condensed form possesses few generic constraints and might thereby acquire greater powers of astonishment. For Falconer, unpredictability is the short story’s chief delight – its unruly tendency to head off without a compass, ‘to arrive somewhere new and fresh’. Perhaps, for that reason, her choices here are decidedly short, with only a handful exceeding ten pages. This brevity undoubtedly contributes to the book’s general air of surprise. ‘I did not want,’ Falconer justifiably says of her selection, ‘to be able to guess from the outset where a story was going.’

This quality is certainly present in Patrick Holland’s ‘Music for Airports’. Its main character is a former Australian diplomat, now aimlessly employed by a trade commission. The story begins in that most liminal of places, the modern airport, where the diplomat is waiting for his flight to Asia. From the air-conditioned terminal, he watches flocks of water-birds – waders, curlews, godwits – rising from the Brisbane mangroves on their way to the icy shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia. This avian migration is the story’s central metaphor. In Asia, the diplomat finds himself being lobbied to save the life of a Chinese man, previously a long-term Australian resident, about to be executed for drug trafficking. The story, musically told in a counter- point of man and bird, takes a number of unexpected turns before reaching its rueful diminuendo, all the while emphasising the great cultural distances that persist in this era of alleged globalisation.

We do not look to short stories for a feeling of closure. Novels, of course, often provide the sense of an ending; that’s why so many of them are wound up by death or marriage, as E.M. Forster once observed. But readerly expectations are different with short fiction; we have learned to treat it more as a garden of forking paths. Such irresolution can be disquieting, as in Davina Bell’s ‘All the Things You Couldn’t Say’. There the narrator is a young woman who engages in various forms of self-mutilation: ‘I carved through my skin with prickly bread knives and jagged steak knives, and hacked at it with the neat, blunt blades of Swiss pocket knives.’ All this is kept hidden while she works as a behavioural therapist with autistic children. Her most difficult patient is a seven-year-old boy called Wilbur, whose vocabulary consists of a few stuttered words. By chance, the narrator manages to establish a connection with the boy by showing him a picture of a child crying. Misery soon becomes a kind of language for the pair. But when the narrator lets Wilbur see the scars of her own unhappiness, the consequences are dire. There is no easy resolution on offer here, and no comfort for the reader; the bleakness of Bell’s story is hard to forget.

Suffering is by no means confined to our own species, and several of the writers in the present anthology register the plight of the animals that share this crowded planet. In Julie Milland’s ‘Every Cure’, a young lab assistant struggles with the task of killing the mice that are to be used in scientific experiments; it is difficult not to sympathise with her need for a slug of vodka. A university honours student in Karen Hitchcock’s ‘The Poetics of Space’ learns about the horrors of factory farming from her unscholarly brother, who has just got a job in the poultry industry: ‘Welcome to the real world, brains,’ he tells her. In ‘War Against the Ungulates’, Bernard Cohen describes the ghastly programme of slaughter carried out by British authorities during the foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001. Cohen’s military-dispatch prose reads like a Kafkaesque fantasy, but the nightmarish events it depicts were all too real. On a much larger scale, Patrick West’s ‘Natural History (World- Swimming)’ imagines a multitude of lives, human and non-human, spanning both centuries and continents. There is a kind of planetary pessimism at work here, perhaps something akin to that experienced by H.G. Wells’s time traveller, the pessimism that comes from recognising the world’s finitude – the transience of everything under the sun, not to mention the sun itself.

Sadness, Tolstoy suggested, is the lifeblood of fiction; all happy families are alike in that they are rarely worth writing about. The final three stories in the collection – by Frank Moorhouse, Nam Le and Brenda Walker – explore the familial tensions that often seem to become accentuated as we get older. Moorhouse’s ‘Revisions’ is an oblique coda to his earlier autobiographical experiment, Martini: A Memoir (2005); with grim humour he records the enduring bitterness of failed marriages and the increasing pathos of bodily decline. This is also the theme of Nam Le’s ‘Meeting Elise’, where a dying artist longs for a chance to prove his love to the daughter he has not seen in seventeen years. (It should be said that the indignities of colorectal cancer detailed here are not for the squeamish.)

Walker’s ‘Big Animals’ is a gentler meditation on maternal affection, set against the backdrop of a Balinese cremation ceremony; though her main subject is the consolation of ritual, Walker still finds room to make wry observations about mortality (such as her dictum that being sick for any length of time always involves a lot of driving). If this anthology is read as it deserves to be – from cover to cover, front to back – then the lingering effect of this last trio of stories is indeed melancholy. In fiction, as well as in fact, the one ineluctable sadness is the onslaught of age, and then the only end of age.