Janette Turner Hospital is an Australian-born novelist with an international reputation, though Australian readers often have reservations about her work. She has written some brilliant short stories, but her novels can strain for effect, with insistent intellectual allusions and postmodern shifts of fictional status. Perhaps, though, this is a typical Australian response to an expatriate writer whose work is not immediately accessible. Australian critics have not been as willing to praise Hospital as some North American readers, including Joyce Carol Oates, who, on the cover of Rainforest Narratives, describes Hospital as ‘a writer of consummate craft and visionary insight’.