The Traveling Tide, Volume 5 by Rosaleen Love

ISBN: 0-9746559-9-6 (10 digit) ISBN: 978-0-9746559-9-4 (13 digit) Publication Date: 5/1/2005 (paperback) 110 pages $12 $9.00

An original collection of seven short stories. Rosaleen Love's stories fairly dance and sing their way along the page, whether the scene is music itself, as in the tale she tells of driving her cousin Bridie, an Australian musicologist and jazz pianist, on a pilgrimage to the source of her music in the US South, or the vast vistas of geological time, or even the arcane science of therolinguistics as it deconstructs the "c(h)oral songs" that are a "series of texts written by air in water." Carmel Bird writes of the final story in the volume, "Once Giants Roamed the Earth": "This story is informed with deep concern for beauty of the earth and speaks urgently for respect and dignity. There is an air of menace and yet a pervasive hum of hope. The writing is firm, confident, and compelling."

"Once Giants Roamed the Earth" is a winner of the 2005 Aurealis Award.

Reviews

"[...]Love coils Stapledon's cosmic vision neatly into a walnut shell, like one of those fine and precious fairytale fabrics that can fit into a tiny space yet expand into practically an entire wardrobe."
—Strange Horizons, December 13, 2005 (read the whole review)

"The stories here include a couple that draw powerfully on the Australian landscape (and seascape) as well as history and myth...But most effective for me was the spooky "In the Shadow of the Stones," in which a somewhat downtrodden woman reflects on her disappeared friends, as she walks the mysterious Australian shoreline."
—Rich Horton, Locus, August 2005

"[A] high quality collection."
—Lorraine Cormack, Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild, May 2006

"This book is a perfect beginning to a literary conversation."
—Gillian Polack, author of Illuminations, September 2006