Karen Brooks states that Australian grunge lit books, such as Clare Mendes' "Drift Street", Edward Berridge's "The Lives of the Saints", and Andrew McGahan's "Praise" "...explorthe psychosocial and psychosexual limitations of young sub/urban characters in relation to the imaginary and socially constructed boundaries defining...self and other" and "opening up" new "liminal [boundary spaces" where the concept of an abject human body can be explored. Brooks states that Berridge's short stories provide "...a variety of violent, disaffected and often abject young people", characters who "...blur and often overturn" the boundaries between suburban and urban space. Brooks states that the marginalized characters in "The Lives of the Saints", "Drift Street" and "Praise") are able to stay in "shit creek" (an undesirable setting or situation) and "diver... flows" of these "creeks", thus claiming their rough settings' "liminality" (being in a border situation or transitional setting) and their own "abjection" (having "abject bodies" with health problems, disease, etc.) as "sites of symbolic empowerment and agency".