Michele Nayman writes best in this collection when she displays her biting anger at the inconsistencies of life. In the story ‘Peter’ she depicts hopeless neurosis which infects, contaminates and ultimately destroys. Peter carries past hurts into new relationships and the vicious circle is never ending. The words in the story cut like blades as the woman struggles to understand: ‘Coffee?’ asks Peter. ‘Yes’, says Laurie mechanically, her eyes on a large photograph on the panel closest to the kitchen. ‘That’s Lyn’, says Peter. ‘I’m married to her.’ His voice is chilling, impersonal. Laurie shudders. The girl looks exactly like her.

Throughout the story, the pain of what’s not said is always there, gnawing on the present.

The story, ’January, Jerusalem’ is even more harrowing. A young woman alone in a foreign country is prey to all kinds of fears – the story is a strong feminist tract for the ‘Reclaim the Night’ campaign. It confirms the experience of all women who are condemned at night to peer forever over their shoulder in case that shadow transforms into a nightmare. But then, just when you feel overwhelmed by the bleak predicament of the women in Faces You Can't Find Again there appears a fleetingly glorious moment like ‘Beginnings’ which reminds me of Katherine Mansfield. As two small children converse, their world rings with more wisdom than most of us adults can ever hope to conjure up.

The story ‘Gerard’ also creates an interlude – a moment’s love is encapsulated, as the protagonists realise that particular second can never occur again: ‘Gerard walks me to the station. It is a pleasant, sunny, summer day. We walk across a park. I look behind me at the large airy house high on the hill, above pebbles and cactus plants. The house is not mine. The children in it are not mine either. Perhaps they could have been. It has been a calm day, a happy day: I felt I belonged. The train arrives. I board, I wave. I’ll call you, he says.’

Another gem, ‘The House on Lafayette Street’ traces the steps of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady to Denver, Colorado, where the YMCA puts up women in furnished rooms, ‘more or less clean’ with ‘faint bloodstained’ lampshades. The story revolves around Graeme Tyler – an archetypal original throwback in the tradition of Helen Garner's Madigan. He gives ‘The House on Lafayette Street’ so much fresh air that you’re sorry when it ends.

The only stories that let me down in the collection were ‘Expectations’ and ‘A clichéd story’ and to a lesser extent ‘Story of a Marriage’. They seem more like essays and carry little of the magic and conviction present in the rest of the collection. They remain simple release valves. But in a collection of 22 stories, the fact that these miss out seems hardly to matter, because some of Michele Nayman’s writing is so raw and alive that you’ll excuse almost anything else. How for instance, can I ever see Melbourne trams the same way again after she has written: ‘The trams clank furiously at each stop, disgorging passengers, swallowing new ones, continuing up Swanston Street towards the Shrine – huge green legless centipedes.’ And how can I forget ‘Lalique’, the creature with liquid limbs and a curved back of Isolde.

We need more stories about what it’s like to be female in today's Australia. Michele Nayman’s women protagonists, like those of Beverley Farmer, Jean Bedford and Helen Garner, do a great deal to shape our imagination of this virgin territory. It seems safe to assume that Michele Nayman’s face will be one we’ll be able to find again.