Among the collection’s previously published inclusions is an excerpt from Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book. Reading it again, I was reminded how much Wright’s book recalls the brilliant, harrowing Imre Kertész novel Kaddish for a Child Not Born. Both evoke the idea of displaced or unborn life – including that of the human animal – and the environments through which life moves and makes itself felt. They each concern, too, what it may mean for our humanity once we find ourselves “living the life of the overcome”. The excerpt concludes with an image of birds chasing one another, in Wright’s inimitable prose, “over the rooftops for space in air thick with the high cost of living for a view of a dead lake”.

John Morrissey’s wonderfully engaging metafiction Five Minutes is partially set in an office. In fact, many of This All Come Back Now’s contributors – Merryana Salem, Alison Whittaker, Timmah Ball – take corporate environments as an invitation to imagine alternative, often dystopian, scenarios. (Not that this is far, as anyone who has ever had the misfortune of working in one knows, from the reality.) Morrissey gives us a doubled narrator: a brooding, abstracted public servant named Michael, who is written in the first-person and working for the Department of Education, counterpointed by the (seemingly auto-fictional) tale he is writing of a man named Jai, caught in the middle of an alien invasion. This invasion sees settler Australians eviscerated from the face of the continent, such that “only Aboriginal people remain, and for the next few minutes they will be in sole and undivided possession [...] its wealth is theirs once more; they have become the richest landlords on earth.”

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Morrissey expertly traces the contours of Michael’s office tedium – the monochrome pastel, the endless formica – in a wry prose style that gestures back to the mise-en-abyme of the story’s narrative: “The department is trying to figure out how to integrate local Aboriginal folklore into the primary school curriculum, as a way of building cross-cultural understanding. It sounds simple enough, but I’ve spent the past five months locked in tedious negotiations with the curriculum authority. For instance, no one can decide which subject the stories should fall under. Global religions? History of Australia? Fictional creations?”

Its combination of schlock bizarrity and game-playing recalls the Argentinian author César Aira, if not Zhuangzi’s famous story about not knowing if he dreamt he was a butterfly or if a butterfly had dreamt that it was Zhuangzi. Its ending, too, is at once beautiful, sardonic, and thought-provoking. The same might be said of this timely anthology.