Summary:

Joe and Mary Wilson live an isolated life in the outback of New South Wales. Their infant son Jim begins to "take convulsions." Jim turns into a sickly child who appears to be "too old fashioned" to survive in this word. After the three-year-old boy has spent a month with his mother's sister, he and Joe begin the two-day trek home. The boy becomes ill while they are camping overnight, and Joe, terrified that his son is going to die, carries him to "Brighten's sister-in-law," who lives in the only homestead in the area. She nurses the boy, who survives.

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Summary:

Joe and Mary Wilson move from the little outback town of Gulong to the bush at Lahey's Creek. Mary becomes depressed over the drudgery and isolation of the place. The closest neighbors are the Spicers, dirt poor folks with a whole passel of children.

Mr. Spicer is usually on the road. Mrs. Spicer tries to maintain some beauty in her life by growing geraniums in the desert. At first she visits the Wilsons frequently, but soon she becomes reluctant to visit because she gets melancholic when she goes home. She tells Mary that the land has broken her--she is "past caring." At the end she dies in her bed. The last thing she tells her daughter to do is to water the geraniums.

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Summary:

The story takes place in the course of one night during the 1820's in the Australian outback. Carney, an Irish convict-turned-revolutionary, is scheduled for execution in the morning. Two soldiers guard him at the lonely outpost. An officer named Adair arrives to interrogate Carney, in the hope that he might betray his surviving comrades, especially Dolan, the leader of the insurrection.

The officer and the prisoner keep a vigil through the long cold night. Carney tells about his impoverished life in Ireland and his goal of achieving freedom for himself and his countrymen. Adair, too, is Irish. He remembers his own, more privileged life in Dublin.

The uneducated Carney asks, "Why is there so much injustice in the world?" Adair has no answer. At dawn Carney asks permission to wash in the stream before he is executed. The officer allows him to do so, and the convict presumably jumps on a horse and successfully flees. It is clear that Adair has permitted his charge to escape.

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Summary:

In 1898 in rural New South Wales, a brother and two sisters are found bludgeoned to death under very peculiar circumstances. The crime creates a sensation throughout Australia, but the mystery is never solved. Nearly 60 years later, one of the last surviving members of the family (12 brothers and sisters) tells the story and, in the process of doing so, reveals the truth of what really happened to his siblings on that tragic day.

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Summary:

Dingle the Fool lives in the family home with his two sisters, their husbands, and their infant children. Their mother left the house to all three in equal shares. One sister, Joanna, wants to sell the old place and buy a modern home. The other sister, Dierdre, wants to remain in the house, especially for Dingle's sake.

Dingle plays in the mulberry patch and doesn't seem to understand much. He has a dirty old tennis ball that he believes is full of happiness. One day Dierdre gives in and agrees to sell. When she tells Dingle, he cuts the tennis ball in half, intending to give part of it to his sister.

However, when he sees that the tennis ball is empty (no happiness!), he cries and goes out to climb his favorite tree. Later that night, the house burns down. But Dingle is found safely sleeping in his tree. Joanna and Dierdre face the prospect of a lovely new house, but Dingle has to go to an institution.

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Summary:

This story takes place late at night in the quiet wards of a hospital. Some of the staff are kidding around about Night Sister Bean, who is supposedly a witch, but is now off-duty because she had an operation. Hilda from Housekeeping is pregnant again.

Since Hilda is unmarried, some of her co-workers come up with the idea of giving her a proper wedding. The Casualty Porter volunteers to be the groom. They just manage to complete the fanciful night wedding when Hilda goes into labor. Her baby is born in an elevator on the way to the maternity ward.

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Summary:

An American physician's life is irrevocably bisected by World War I. Before volunteering for medical duty in the war, Dr. William Lloyd's existence was structured, safe, and even obedient. After his experience supervising a hospital in France, his life becomes uninhibited, tumultuous, and eventually dangerous.

After the war ends and he returns home, Dr. Lloyd soon divorces his wife and leaves his family. He returns to Europe with the sole purpose of being reunited with Jeanne Prie, a bewitching and extraordinary nurse he worked with in France. She is also a dedicated microbiologist and possesses some of the characteristics of Joan of Arc. Dr. Lloyd has become infatuated with her. Ironically, he dies a victim of scientific research after inoculating himself with an experimental serum that he hoped might be a successful vaccine.

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Summary:

Erin Bennett, a high school senior, faces the possibility of missing out on the senior play because of the violent headaches that have afflicted her since her sister's death a year before in a car accident. No physical cause has been found for the headaches, and her parents have insisted that she see a psychotherapist. Erin goes, resentfully at first, and after a few weeks begins to accept the possibility that her continuing pain may have something to do with the stress of unresolved grief which is exacerbated by various trigger events.

She is cast in West Side Story opposite David, to whom she takes an instant dislike, though she has the haunting feeling she has seen him before. Attracted to her, he pursues her despite fairly direct rejection, until Erin figures out where she's seen him: she took her sister's place once in clown costume and makeup at a party where he was also a clown.

David, whose little sister is hearing impaired, helps bring Erin to a place of acknowledging the ways in which she is hanging on both to her grief and to unresolved anger at her sister's boyfriend. She also blames herself for the accident, since she asked her sister to take the car on an errand in her place.

At a final counseling session, the therapist helps Erin and her parents understand how, in focusing attention on Erin's headaches instead of their own unattended grief, they have become "stuck" in a loop of stress and alienation. Going through a trunk of her sister's things, Erin finds a way ritually to say good-bye and joins David at a party with a renewed willingness to choose life and a hope that she can free herself from both blame and pain.

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Summary:

Jacob Hansen is sheriff, undertaker, and pastor in the little Wisconsin town of friendship. A Civil War veteran like many of the men in his town, he has seen many faces of death and knows how to balance compassion, prayer, and practicality in the presence of grief. When he recognizes a diphtheria epidemic as one after another the people of Friendship fall ill and die, he has to shoulder responsibility for protecting public health.

This means imposing and enforcing quarantine, extending even to the encampment of religious revivalists at the edge of town who mostly keep their distance and their own ways. Jacob's equanimity falters when his wife and baby daughter succumb; he keeps them alive in his mind and unburied for days, unable to acknowledge his own loss, though he helps others through theirs.

Finally he forces a passing railroad engineer to transport the survivors across the quarantine border into a neighboring town for safety, but the train is sabotaged, wrecked, and the fugitives killed. Jacob survives almost alone to return to what is now a ghost town and cope with the grim fate of survival.

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Summary:

Amidst the desolate pampas of Argentina, two nameless fugitives serendipitously meet and fall deeply in love. The woman, an orphan, is running from her tragic past and sheltered life. The man, a gaucho, is fleeing from the seven vengeful brothers of a man he killed during a fight.

Although both are emotionally wounded and isolated, they become joined by the simple act of cleaning and dressing the deep laceration of the gaucho’s arm. When they discover the ecstasy and contentment of love, their passion is abruptly and violently challenged by the gaucho’s injured arm which becomes infected with tetanus.

The woman faithfully cares for her suffering lover who silently endures the fever, severe muscle spasms, and wasting of tetanus before succumbing to the painful death of lockjaw. Ironically his face is paralyzed with a twisted smile due to the persistent muscle contractions.

The brothers of the man whom the gaucho had killed arrive too late to exact their revenge so they set fire to the couple’s farmhouse and burn it to the ground. The woman places a handful of her lover’s burning ashes in her mouth thus preserving his remains and uniting his spirit with hers forever.

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