Mumbai-born writer Roanna Gonsalves shapes the experiences of Indian migrants living in Australia through her well-rounded, character-driven stories and blunt expressions of frustration. According to the protagonist in the opening 40-page story, Australia is a place in which ‘birds cry like babies, where prime ministers are swallowed up by oceans and deputies, and where 40 000-year-old living cultures have been fossilised in the space of two centuries’.

The Indian characters in her stories are never comfortable: relationships split under the weight of interminable petrol station shifts and casual racism escalates rapidly into violence. These are contemporary, realistic stories of disillusionment in a country that naively still thinks of itself as the place of the fair go.

Reviewed by Angus Dalton