These moving and insightful stories help us to find our place in a world in which we have all become rootless travelers. Janette Turner Hospital's characters are exiles who share an intimate knowledge of dislocation: from their culture, from their native countries, from themselves. Her intimate stories capture the turning points in her characters lives from Indian lovers on a last romantic weekend before their arranged marriages to a daughter's welcome home after years of travel. Janette Turner Hospital is a wanderer herself. A native of Australia, she has lived in India, England, Canada, and...

Outer Maroo, a small, opal mining town in the Australian outback, is stewing in heat, drought, and guilty anxiety. Some ghastly cataclysm has occurred on the opal fields, but this is a taboo subject. At the heart of the mystery is the cult messiah, Oyster, dressed in white, sexually compelling, and preaching the end of time.

The Last Magician is about power and betrayal, sexual obsession and social ostracism. At its center is Lucy, a good girl and a whore, whose nights are spent in a kaleidoscope of identities as she dons the masks her customers demand. Charlie is a photographer, filmmaker, voyeur, and the last magician--monitoring Lucy, piecing together the splinters of evidence surrounding the death of a child and a murder that happened half a lifetime ago. A New York Times Notable Book. Reading group guide included.

Janette Turner Hospital's electrifying novel chronicles the lives of two strangers connected by the tragic loss of parents in a hijacked Paris-New York flight. As an adult, Samantha, one of the children set free by the terrorists, has become obsessed with the hijacking. Under the guise of her senior thesis, she pulls Lowell, the son of a victim, into a web of terror, death, and betrayal that he has spent his adult life trying to forget. Hospital's electrifying novel is a tightly woven web of familial and national histories, of sexual and political passions, and of individual and national...

In these prize-winning, "heartbreakingly nuanced" ("Speakeasy") stories, Janette Turner Hospital explores the infinite incarnations of loss; lovers meeting again in midlife re-experience, through the memory of photographs both real and imagined, the passion that both frightened and thrilled them; a young dental hygienist adrift, living in a hostel in northern Australia, receives a heart-wrenching visit from her drug-dependent brother; a mother and adolescent daughter move into a new house, and their sense of safety is shaken when the previous owner reappears, desperate to reclaim what he has...

In this compelling reimagining of the Orpheus myth, Leela, a young mathematician, encounters gifted Australian musician Mishka performing in the subway. The connection is immediate; a steamy love affair ensues. Insulated by their love, the pair ignores the anxious urban landscape. But when Leela is picked up off the street and taken to an interrogation center and an explosion rocks the subway, the fabric of their bond--and their very identities--begins to unravel. Reading group guide included.