Salt City Runaway

Helen Garner moves into a letterbox. Dead bats rain from the sky. A woman offers Lou Reed her last cigarette at a suburban bus stop.
In fifty piercing stories, Salt City Runaway introduces a cast of unforgettable characters who disrupt and delight.

From Western Australia’s port city of Fremantle, to its red-dusted Goldfields and wave-washed South West, women and girls fight for recognition and solace. Slippery, complicated, tender and broken, they carry their humanity in vivid, strange worlds. Salt City Runaway is a luminous debut that reveals beauty and wonder in the smallest of stories. It is a masterclass in flash fiction.

Gillian O’Shaughnessy is Australia’s most celebrated flash fiction writer and a highly respected journalist and broadcaster. Her work has appeared in the Best Small Fictions anthologies (2023–2025) and has won international prizes. A former ABC journalist and broadcaster, she has spent three decades interviewing some of the world’s most prominent authors and thinkers. Gillian is a sub-editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, teaches masterclasses in flash fiction, and is serving as a 2026 Stella Prize judge. Drawing from a lifetime of storytelling—from radio to stage to page—Salt City Runaway is Gillian’s first book.