AustLit

These eleven stories bound together by recurring characters and by subtle devices such as the painter Marc Chagall and an overheard conversation on a train gradually develop the surprising resonances of a fictional world that is both familiar and strange, engaging and exhilarating.

What happens when three old friends from NIDA meet again? What is Marc Chagall doing in St Peters in the twenty-first century? Why does a young woman disappear in suburban Sydney? These people are governed by a swarm of impulses that hurl them into situations that are sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking. There's seduction by cake, a buried secret and the announcement of a pregnancy on a peak-hour train. In eleven stories, bound together by recurring characters, Kissane creates a fictional world that is familiar and strange, engaging and exhilarating. Ultimately, The Swarm is a book about love: the difficulty of finding love and hanging onto it in the face of the dilemmas thrown up by life.