AustLit

'From the critically acclaimed author of Mr Wigg comes an enthralling literary novel about a batmaker and a gifted young cricketer, set around the time the game began changing. For fans of Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland.

'Cricket has a willow heart. Batmakers around the world have tried everything, crafting bats from birch, maple, ash, even poplars . . . After two hundred years, cricket bat making is still beholden to a single species: salix alba caerulea - or white willow

'Reader Cricket Bats, one of the last traditional batmakers back in the old country, has a contemporary home in the Antipodes, with Allan Reader keeping the family business alive in a small workshop. Allan lives alone, all but estranged from his adult daughter, quietly going about his days with the cricket commentary for company.

'When Todd Harrow, a gifted young batter, catches Allan's eye, a spark is lit and Allan decides to make a Reader bat for him, selecting the best piece of willow he's harvested in years to do so.

'As Harrow charts a meteoric rise to the highest echelons of the sport, leaving his equally talented sister's dreams in his wake, Allan's magical bat takes centre stage as well, awakening something in Allan and bringing him back into himself. But can Allan's fledgling renaissance - hanging as it does on the magic of that bat - carry on after Harrow is cursed by injury and a strained personal life?

'Set as the new short form of the game began to gain prominence, Willowman is a love letter to the art and beauty of cricket and a meditation on the inner lives of certain kinds of men and women, for whom it is a way of life. Award-winning author Inga Simpson writes exquisitely about a national sport you will never view the same way again.' (Publication summary)

'AFTER THE FIRES. AFTER THE VIRUS. THEY CAME. A remarkable literary novel from the multi-award-nominated Australian writer

'It's night, and the walls of Rachel's home creak as they settle into the cover of darkness. Fear has led her to a reclusive life on the land, her only occasional contact with her sister.

'A hammering on the door. There stand a mother, Hannah, and her sick baby. They are running for their lives from a mysterious death sweeping the Australian countryside.

'Now Rachel must face her worst fears: should she take up the fight to help these strangers survive in a society she has rejected for so long' (Production summary) 

'Each chapter of this absorbing memoir explores a particular species of tree, layering description, anecdote, and natural history to tell the story of a scrap of forest in the Sunshine Coast hinterland - how the author came to be there and the ways it has shaped her life.

'In many ways, it's the story of a tree-change, of escaping suburban Brisbane for a cottage on ten acres in search of a quiet life. Of establishing a writers' retreat shortly before the Global Financial Crisis hit, and losing just about everything when it did.

'It is also the story of what the author found there: the literature of nature and her own path as a writer. Understory is about connection to place as a white settler descendant, and the search for a language appropriate to describe that experience. '