This collection of short stories resonates with the knowledge of life. The metaphor of art is a good one to apply here, for these are stories experienced and built on visions of both the large Turner-esque seas and the small still ponds beloved and immortalised by Monet.

The fact is that like all art, the author is actually telling us the truth—through their own lens perhaps, but it is a form of reality. The core of each story is true but what a delightful artifice and generous framing of sly asides and what a parade, a frieze of madcap caricatures! These are stories drawn from a life lived in Europe and settled in Australia. They are told in a strong voice accented by a fuller and more evolved understanding of the possibilities of language.

Staying with the metaphor of the art world, the subject matter carries readers through rooms and spaces like a gallery; where life lessons and tales are whispered and unfolded. The narrator's experience forged in the crucible of a long life of travel, of being an outsider and of that almost dinosaur characteristic—that fashionable in purchase but often foreign in undertaking, grail like pursuit of knowledge; the pastime of reading stories in books.

Stephen Tandori was born in 1936 in Metkovic, Yugoslavia and arrived in Australia in 1959 as a political refugee. He had various jobs for a year or two before taking up picture framing and art restoration as well as dabbling in fine art sales in conjunction with his older brother John in High Street, Armadale. In 1975, he moved to Sydney to establish Seascape Galleries. He returned to Melbourne fifteen years later and took up painting as a professional artist, residing in Baxter on a fairly large farm on the Mornington Peninsula. He lives there with his wife Pamela, three children and scores of noisy peacocks. Stephen wrote poetry in the old country, and despite accolades of being the finest poet of his generation, including a stipend to move to Princeton University in the USA, he decided to gracefully decline the offer. After visiting Hill End on the invitation of artist Garry Shead to stay in an artist colony some years back, he resumed writing but only short stories, alas unable to write poetry any more.