In this short story collection, travelers on highways and trains are preoccupied with the lives of the dead, with lost children, or with parents. A woman searches a suburban deadland for her missing mother. A rural family struggles on a land that fails to sustain them. A young man's attempt to leave the strictures of family life ends in violence. Jane Skelton writes cool prose about hot landscapes, about characters seeking relief from strong emotions, about characters whose lives are tied up, inextricably, with the Australian landscape.