North of Nowhere, South of Loss

the long version

"In these stories Janette Turner Hospital explores the infinite incarnations of loss - lovers meeting again in midlife reexperience, 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 lost. Hospital's characters oscillate between estrangement and intense connectedness, between a permanent sense of dislocation and a yearning to belong."--BOOK JACKET.