Watch of gryphons and other stories / by Owen Marshall.

Buried lives -- Passing triptych -- Facing Jack Palance -- The fan -- A kind of living -- Poetic licence -- A modern story -- Family circle -- Images -- Fellow citizens -- Buster -- Minding lear -- Margaret's view -- Arnal retent and a place in history -- Journey's end -- Voices with a common theme -- Celeine and the Pygmalion theatre -- Hodge -- Watch of Gryphons.

The empty tussock dryness of New Zealand's South Island, the ancient stone buildings of Italy's Perugia, unsolved murder, the capricious indignity of Alzheimer's disease, adoption - there is a rich variety of setting and subject in this superb new collection by short fiction master Owen Marshall. Several longer stories give WATCH OF GRYPHONS a special depth and resonance, but present, as always, is the startling range and subtlety of emotion readers have come to expect from this most gifted of writers. Few other authors can move as deftly from the almost unbearably touching to the wildly absurd or the tenderly ordinary; few can see so much within and behind the everyday of life.