AustLit

'Tegan Bennett Daylight chats with fellow author Alice Robinson about her new book, The Details: On Love, Death and Reading. This is a live recording of an online event hosted via Zoom during the Covid-19 crisis.'  (Production summary)

'For the first time in history, this past Australian summer has registered temperatures in excess of two degrees above long-term averages. You don’t need to be well versed in climate science to know that this is not good news – and you don’t need to look very hard to glean this information.'  (Introduction)

'After a catastrophic storm destroys Melbourne, Isobel flees to higher ground with her husband and young daughter. Food and supplies run low, panic sets in and still no help arrives. To protect her daughter, Isobel must take drastic action.

'The Glad Shout is an extraordinary novel of rare depth and texture. Told in a starkly visual and compelling narrative, this is a deeply moving homage to motherhood and the struggles faced by women in difficult times.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Jack sometimes slept on his back, one arm flung across, face buried in the crook of his elbow. He lay still, hardly breathing. Their bedroom might have been any room, anywhere, but for the smell of wattle-blossom coming in through the fly-screen. And the heat. The night was seamless, inky. It poured into the house, filling up the space between walls, muffling. Lara lay in the dark beside Jack, listening to frog-song with clenched jaw. There was always a mosquito, more than one. She bunched the damp sheet in her fists, wringing. She could feel the heat coming off Jack's body where her thigh ran alongside his. He was so still. Sometimes Lara believed that he might have smothered himself with the weight of his own limb...

'When her mother disappears into the bush, ten-year-old Laura makes an impulsive decision that will haunt her for decades. Despite her anger and grief, she sets about running the house, taking care of her younger sister, and helping her father clear their wild acreage to carve out a farm.

'But gradually they realise that while they may own the land, they cannot tame it – nor can they escape their past.

'Anchor Point is an eloquent and arresting Australian novel no reader will easily forget.' (Publication summary)

Robinson suggests that 'Cho's work reflects back the problematic nature of identity, particularly in response to migration. But the book also speaks of other kinds of transitions - adolescence, sexual awakening, shifting familial relationships, employment - and the questions they raise about who we are. Cho demonstrates that when uncertainty arises, sometimes meaning is made and identity formed through nothing more substantial than story: "I said that, according to various myths and popular stories, morphing is accomplished via touch … that was no problem because myths and popular stories were also on television" (138). This is social commentary, cultural critique, and rollicking adventure through pop culture.'