Burton has the sort of perspective on life that is impossible for most adults to comprehend: the perspective of an eight-year-old boy. When Burt meets Jessica he finds solace from the problems of growing up but when he declares his love, he is placed in an institution for disturbed children.

Sonja Buloh was three years old in 1954 and her father drinking too much when her mother walked into a blizzard never to return. Thirty-five years later, when Sonja visits Tasmania and her drunken father, the shadows of their immigrant past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present so changing his living death and her ordered life.

Spanning three generations, this story centres around a woman born at the turn of the 20th century into an austere Punjabi family. It tells of an illicit affair and its wider political and social implications - not least the vexed issue, for Indian women, of marriage versus education.

Australian schoolteacher Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted pupil, nine-year-old Lucien. Kate is fixated on a crime of passion that occurred years earlier in a nearby town and as her mind unravels, she becomes less and less aware of her own reputation in the present.

Archaeologist David Norfolk is searching for a 400-year-old Portuguese shipwreck off the coast of New South Wales. Such a find would rewrite the history of Australia. But instead he unearths the body of a man murdered fifty years earlier, and begins to unravel a more personal kind of history.

A collection of stories which rework fairytales, Greek and Sanskrit mythology, and mix it with the author's original material. Other work by the author includes "The Conversations of Cow", "The Blue Donkey Fables" and "The Mothers of Maya Diip".