One of the world's finest short-story writers.' Robert Drewe 'Dark Rootsannounces the arrival of a major talent in Australian Fiction. Cate Kennedy has a near pitch-perfect voice and a feeling for the precise moment when stars move in the cosmos.' Peter Temple 'Kennedy's stories are immaculate little slivers of life that needle into my heart and mind, and stay there. She's a writer's writer.' Toni Jordan In these sublimely sophisticated tales, Cate Kennedy opens up worlds of finely observed detail. Her stories are populated by people at tipping points in their lives - moments that find them poised between a familiar past and an unfamiliar future. A cancer sufferer boards a plane with three kilos of cocaine in her luggage; a neglected wife plans an unsavoury revenge on her boorish husband; a married couple realise their too-tight wedding rings may symbolise wider aspects of their relationship. Heartbreaking, evocative and richly comic, Dark Rootsunveils the traumas that incite us to desperate measures, and the coincidences that drive our lives.