Books by Rebecca Burns

That dandelion. A flash of stubborn yellow in a dark box of space. It had promised sunshine but had tasted sour. Artefacts. A dandelion. A mayfly. A family, bereft. Items and mementos of a life, lived hard and with love, or long, empty, bitter. In these sharply drawn and unflinching short stories, Rebecca Burns unpicks the connection between the lives we live and what we leave behind.

The body had no name. It was not supposed to be there...Jess is a researcher on a quest to give the one-hundred-year-old skeleton, discovered in the exhumed grave of a prominent bishop, an identity. But she's not sure of her own - her career is stalling, her marriage is failing. She doesn't want to spend hours in the archives, rifling through dusty papers in an endless search for a name. And when a young man named Hayden makes clear his interest in her, Jess has to decide what is most important to her.

Sudden, shattering moments of realisation; creeping, gradual self-awareness - Catching the Barramundi is a collection of contemporary short stories charting the dichotomous processes of reassessment and reflection. A lonely widow living in the Australian Outback has an unexpected encounter with a visiting scientist; an ice-hockey star returns to the site of his home town, now razed to the ground; a grieving husband recalls incidents from his married life - the characters in each tale experience moments of introspection and self-scrutiny, quite out of step with their daily lives.

During the hot summer of 1906, anger simmered in Atlanta, a city where the races lived peacefully. But racial hatred came to the forefront during a heated political campaign, and the city's newspapers fanned its flames with sensational reports alleging assaults on white women by black men. This title reveals a tragic chapter from Atlanta's past.