Gillian Mears is a courageous and strikingly original storyteller who has twice won Commonwealth Writers' regional awards, as well as the coveted Vogel Award. Her early stories - from the prizewinning Ride a Cock Horse and the critically acclaimed Fineflour - chronicle life in small country towns. Their raw atmosphere of grief and sadness is alleviated by Mears' consistently unconventional sense of the comic. the later stories use a wider lens, introducing a shift in sexual orientation and presenting different angels on the country town, along with locales in Africa, France and England."Passionate, intimate, intuitive recollections of life ... intense, lyrical and profoundly celebratory."Karen Lamb, Age