The collection’s lead story, ‘Hebe’s Lament’, won the 2024 American Association of Australasian Literary Studies prize for Creative Prose. Gay Lynch sets her first collection, Hebe’s Lament and Other Stories, in the contemporary cities of Budapest and Cabourg, Melbourne and Shanghai, along with historical Ireland and rural South Australia where she has 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 riffs from feminist, social realist and speculative perspectives. Blinded by indecision, protagonists act. An art academic rescues a beautiful boy, an accountant abandons her dementing father, a coroner risks her reproductive rights, a DFAT careerist falls for a commitment-phobe, a dirt farmer cares for his disabled child, a vet student loses her dog at a Celtic festival, a police officer takes a king hit in the line of duty, tutors harass students, a homeless woman becomes stranded at a writers’ festival.
