In Jack Norman's debut collection a terminal cancer patient is made a lifetime member of his local cricket club; a yuppie couple move from the city to a Barrier Reef town in search of life-defining hardship; an extended family reunite for a funeral in a dying outback town and a son remembers his father's numerous, not always unsalutary, obsessions.
Set in Central and North Queensland (Tropic of Capricorn), these stories are deceptively realist Strayan dreamscapes, evoking Carver, Steinbeck, Patrick White, and David Malouf, among other masters of the fictional phantasia. With strong doses of sardonic humour, bird's eye view compassion and banana bender bluntness, Norman gives full inner and outer life to the proverbial "Middle Australians."