The annual Samoa Observer Tusitala Short Story Competition offers an opportunity for the voices of writers from around the region to be heard. In this collection of the finalists’ stories, the fifth in the series, the stories’ main protagonists include, among others, a mute Samoan five year old boy, an elderly Korean man, an unschooled Tuamotuan teenager, a confident Maori mother, a blind Fijian grandmother, and a cat! The settings are equally diverse: the reader travels from a remote farm in Kawhia to a cyclone in Apia Harbour in the 19th century, from the veranda of a Sydney holiday home to a Pago Pago prison, and from a hospital ward in Port Moresby to under Mangere Bridge in Auckland.