THE PAST PRESENT eBooks

THE PAST PRESENT is an eclectic mix of twenty-one stories with some of the premises - octogenarian love - leprechauns - Al Gore is Spartacus - the fate of a Haider fan .... The wit is sometimes wicked wit, the style quirky and the touch very human. A strong first collection by a new Australian writer.

The stories in THE PAST PRESENT let us travel seamlessly from Australia, through Algeria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Russia, to Britain and beyond. The book contains a good mix of thought-provoking work, leavened by the occasional humorous piece. The first story, The Past Present, is about Franz and Klara Muller, exiled Germans living in Australia, who find themselves forced to confront the fragility of their lives, when the past comes knocking in the form of a war crimes investigator posing as a German language student. Following that comes No Man's Land, a short short, set in the Algeria of 1957, in which a family finds itself caught up in the war between the NLF and the French. The story is narrated by the then nine year old Samir. In a lighter mood, we have The True Story of What Really Happened to Humpty the D, and, towards the end of the book, Grow Up. This story deals with the quirky Pamela, who in refusing to grow up, finds she has come full circle when she becomes a grandmother, and realises that her grandchildren understand her in a way that no one else has ever done. A strong first collection by a new Australian writer.

THE PAST PRESENT by Sylvia Petter - Get eBooks