A young singer runs into the desert of gold rush Kalgoorlie; Chagall comes to Paris in the twenties; a hippie couple survey their ideals as Whitlam is deposed; a middle-aged man looks at his life after cancer on the eve of the millennium. Fourteen luminous stories from Joan London's award-winning collections, Sister ships, and Letter to Constantine, together with two later stories, span the twentieth century in a volume that is storytelling at its very best.