Common Places
by Gillian Hagenus

Fourteen Australian suburban gothic stories

A$34.99

Ships on 1/09/2026

Overview

The Australian suburbs are stranger than they seem – sun-bleached streets haunted by memory, cul‑de‑sacs edged with bushland that watches back, and homes where dangers lurk behind familiar fences. Between neighbours who know too much, houses that hum with memories best forgotten, and bushfire smoke seeping into backyards this collection of short fiction reveals the quite anxieties that shape our domestic lives.

Subversive, intimate and darkly imaginative, Common Places drags these quiet streets into the light, revealing a gothic noir landscape where the familiar turns unsettling – reminding us that the most terrifying things are often the ones that feel closest to home.

Details

Mirandi Riwoe

‘Moody and compelling. Each story is deliciously off-centre.’

Laura Elvery

‘Common Places is an absorbing, beguiling book. Hagenus's depictions of the strangeness of suburbia shine in this sharp and intriguing collection.’

QLA Glendower Award Judges’ comments

‘Perfectly crafted and calibrated ... a serious new voice in Australian fiction.’

QLA Glendower Award Judges’ comments

‘These fourteen stories are perfectly crafted and calibrated. Gillian Hagenus explores the dark humour, the underbelly and the ordinary and extraordinary of Australian suburbia in a delightfully subversive and inventive way. Using an impressive range of narrative styles and perspectives, she has delivered a collection of fiction that announces her as a serious new voice in Australian fiction.’

Gillian Hagenus

Gillian Hagenus is one of the organisers of the Australian Short Story Festival and worked for three years as an editor at MidnightSun Publishing in Adelaide. She holds a Master of Philosophy in Creative Writing, and her work has been shortlisted and longlisted for a number of awards, including Boroondara, Djillong, Nielma Sidney and Peter Carey short story awards. She is the editor of the short story anthology, Strangely Enough (2023). Common Places won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer in 2025; it is her first collection of short fiction.