Barry Oakley is a former literary editor of The Australian. He is the author of numerous short stories and of five novels including A Salute to the Great McCarthy and Don’t Leave Me. He has also written many plays and has published a selection from his diaries titled Minitudes.

He is the editor of numerous bestselling short story collections for The Five Mile Press. Families, the sixth title in the series, includes memorable short stories by Cate Kennedy, Tim Winton, David Malouf and many more of Australia’s best contemporary writers.

Bonding, battling, breaking … the stories in this engrossing collection shed high and lowlights on families from every angle. Heroic mothers,

estranged fathers, resentful siblings, children losing their innocence – even a family ghost or two.

Some of Australia’s finest writers – and some who should be better known –present the total spectrum of family life, from the happy to the hopeless, in 25 stories collected by Barry Oakley.

These stories powerfully depict the shifting patterns of family life, but they’re much more than social docments,’ says Oakley.

‘The criterion was vitality. To be selected, the narratives needed to be charged in some way, to have a spark in the telling.’

What is highlighted in this collection is that it’s not so much the idea of the family that is changing, as ideas about the roles of those within it.

‘There can be no doubt that the idea of the family is changing, and this is mirrored in the variety of narratives and characters assembled here. Sometimes it’s a bastion, sometimes it’s a battlefield, often it’s both.

‘The family might indeed not be what it once was – but still, as so many of these stories show, its force is centripetal – searching always for love, its gravitational centre.’

Click on the cover images below for more information or to purchase Barry Oakley's short story collections.























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