When George Hobbes—scientific genius­—dies, his widow, Meridee, hosts a lunch for three friends. As secrets unravel through their reminiscences, Meridee's genteel Blue Mountains idyll dissolves into a battleground.

Two worlds ruled by terror interact: Russia’s poet-hero Anna Akhmatova is under house arrest in Stalinist Leningrad, while her friends attempt to save her writings. In a futuristic Australia, a similar oppression by corporate society has suppressed all memory of literature and the natural world.

The plays in this volume were landmarks in the development of a rough new all-Australian theatre that celebrated the rude colour of Australian language and mores. It was a period of comedy and satire, but these plays reveal a sharp social criticism at work beneath the larrikinism.

Liz has retreated to the mountains from the furore created by her latest book. Her husband Gareth is driving to visit her but is shaken when a woman runs into the path of his car—the consequences for all three adults are far-reaching.

In 1923 the writer Katherine Mansfield went to the guru Gurdjieff in Fontainebleau in the hope that he might ‘cure her soul’. In the 1980s in Sydney, a young man awakes in hospital to find a world dominated by women