AustLit

'A powerful and important novel with a crucial and timely feminist message, from the Stella Prize-shortlisted author of Little Gods.

'She tells me to sit down, says that she has something I need to hear and it's that they don't cut hair or set curls. Well they do sometimes, but not always, she says. She takes off her rubber glove and tosses it to the sink. We help them with a problem. We make it go away.

'In a near-future Australia, the world has changed. A small circus caravan travels the countryside performing for dwindling audiences. Matriarch Queenie works outside the law, helped by high-diver Win, nineteen and yearning for love. By night, they gather under the dark sky joined by philosophical clown Valentina, and Girl, who they found at the side of the road. By day, they offer other services: hairdressing for women and a close shave for men. But while women come to them for help, men tend to disappear.

'And in the distance, a reverend and his nun-like companion preach against alcohol, adultery and abortion. Two groups on an ideological collision course in a landscape altered by time and human error, while overhead a space mission has gone wrong.

'Hurdy Gurdy sits alongside classics like The Handmaid's Tale, Station Eleven and The Natural Way of Things, and is a provocation; compelling and haunting. It's a feminist revenge tale about the choices that women have to make and asks the big questions:

'Can beauty be found in times of great darkness?' (Publication summary)

'In the Mallee, wide flat scrubland in north-western Victoria, men are bred quiet, women stoic and the gothic is never far away. Olive Lovelock has just turned twelve. Olive is smart, fanciful and brave and on the cusp of something darker than the small world she has known her entire life. She knows that adults aren't very good at keeping secrets and makes it her mission to uncover as many as she can. When she learns that she once had a baby sister who died—a child unacknowledged by her family— she becomes convinced it was murder. Her obsession with the mystery and relentless quest to find out what happened have seismic repercussions. It is Olive herself who has the most to lose as the secrets she unearths multiply and take on complicated lives of their own.

'Little Gods is a novel about the mess of family, about vengeance and innocence lost. It explores resilience and girlhood, and questions how families live with their complexities and contradictions. Resonating with echoes of Australian classics like Seven Little Australians, Cloudstreet and Jasper Jones, Little Gods is told with similar idiosyncrasy, insight and style. Funny and heart-breaking, this is a rare and original novel about a remarkable girl who learns the hard way that the truth doesn't always set you free.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'I know that two men are coming up the mountain, at this moment, including the boy from far away. I wonder what my grandson's face will look like.This is a boy in the skin of a man.I know the boy is innocent, that it's his family soul which is guilty.

'An old woman sits waiting in a village that clings to a Turkish mountainside, where the women weave rugs, make tea and keep blood secrets that span generations. Berna can see what others cannot, so her secrets are deeper and darker than most. It is time for her to tell her story, even though the man for whom her words are meant won't hear them. It is time for the truth to be told.

Nearly a hundred years before, her father James had come to the village on the back of a donkey, gravely ill, rescued from the abandoned trenches of Gallipoli by a Turkish boy whose life he had earlier spared. James made his life there, never returning to Australia and never realising that his own father was indeed the near-mythical bushranger that the gossips had hinted at when he'd been a boy growing up in Beechworth.

'Now, as Berna waits, a young man from Melbourne approaches to visit his parents' village, against the vehement opposition of his cursed, tight-lipped grandfather. What is the astonishing story behind the dark deeds that connect the two men, unknown to each other and living almost a century apart?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.