cover image Home and Away

Home and Away

. Penguin Books, $6.95 (232pp) ISBN 978-0-14-008075-9

In this collection of short stories, Australian writersincluding Elizabeth Jolley, Frank Moorhouse and Andrew Taylorexplore the theme of travel and the sensibility of Australians who venture away from home. Croswell, a Sydney writer and literary agent, notes in her introduction that ""busy, air conditioned airports and `international' hotels can provide just as fruitful a source of the travel experience as vistas of snow, wastelands of desert and the threatening landscape of uncharted territories.'' Moorhouse's ``The New York Bell Captain'' is a comic horror story about the exaggerated self-consciousness of a tourist in Manhattan. In Taylor's ``The Absolutely Ordinary Family,'' a solitary woman observes a vacationing family and realizes that she will always watch the drama of other people's lives from the outside. In ``The Fellow Passenger,'' Jolley reveals the inner voyage of a middle-aged doctor on a cruise. Unfortunately, not all the tales here are as entertaining and perceptive as these threemost of the the other journeys in this volume are incomplete. (August)