Hebe’s Lament and Other Stories

A surgeon teeters between activism and pessimism. An art academic rescues a beautiful boy. A coroner risks her reproductive rights. A DFAT careerist falls for a commitment-phobe. A dirt farmer cares for his disabled child. A police officer takes a king hit in the line of duty and a homeless woman loses all hope at a writers’ festival.

Gay Lynch sets her first collection Hebe’s Lament and Other Stories in contemporary cities – Budapest and Cabourg, Melbourne and Shanghai – and rural Ireland and South Australia where she lived as an adult and child. Zeitgeisty paradoxes – anarchy and care, death and dying, nature and its destruction, poetry and play, sex with bots, violence and justice, fractured hope – generate surprising riffs.

The collection’s lead story ‘Hebe’s Lament’ won the 2024 American Association of Australasian Literary Studies prize for Creative Prose.