AustLit

(Introduction)

'Zoë Sadokierski’s Father, Son and Other Animals opens with a moment of disconnection, as she describes her father’s tendency to retreat into himself when they are together, disappearing into imaginary golf practice. ‘Sometimes when I’m talking to Dad, he’s not there. I look over and see that he’s gone.’ In keeping with the book’s broader interplay of humour and darker concerns, Sadokierski uses it as an excuse for a moment of black comedy. ‘When he’s like this, I could say anything,’ she continues. ‘Dad, I’m really struggling being a working parent. I’m drinking at breakfast.’ But, like the animal skull he later presents her, her father’s distraction prefigures the larger absence that will eventually overtake him, transforming the scene into a sort of memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of loss that shadows all life. And, no less importantly, it suggests a larger kind of extinction, one summoned up by the mute images of feathers and bones sketched alongside the words.' (Introduction)

'Melbourne author Myfanwy Jones’s last novel, the 2015 Miles Franklin-shortlisted Leap, was a deceptively complex creation. Emotionally acute and raw in its portrayal of guilt and grief, it was simultaneously oddly elliptical, with an almost allegorical dimension. Although her new novel, Cool Water, shares Leap’s light-footedness and crystal-clear prose, at least initially it feels more conventional. But as the novel proceeds it quickly becomes clear that it shares a very similar sensibility, and more than a little of Leap’s obliqueness and preparedness to take narrative risks.'(Introduction)

'In the opening pages of Charlotte Wood’s new novel, the narrator takes a detour to the cemetery outside the town where she grew up. She is there to visit her parents’ graves for the first time in 35 years, although that process is complicated by her difficulty locating them and by the discovery somebody left “ugly plastic flowers” by their headstones. As she walks away the narrator recalls the phone call she received to tell her that her mother’s headstone was ready, “my outsides unaltered but everything within me plummeting. Like a sandbank collapsing inside me.”' (Introduction)   

'On the Sunday before Sydney’s lockdown tightened for the second time, my partner and I drove to Coogee Beach. We were there to see the ocean one last time before our range of movement contracted to a mere five kilometres; a restriction that would cut us off from the coast. Cases that day were in the 400s, and rising, and both of us knew there was little chance we would be allowed back before October at the earliest.' (Introduction)

'Garth Nix chats with fellow author James Bradley about his enthralling new historical fantasy, The Left-Handed Booksellers of London. This is a live recording of an online event hosted via Zoom during the Covid-19 crisis.'  (Production summary)

'In the middle of last year, I visited Hobart. Officially, I was there to help run a writing workshop; unofficially, I was there for a gathering organised by a philanthropist with an interest in the environment. The guest list was eclectic – some scientists, an artist who has been creating work from ocean plastics and her partner, a writer or two – but there was no agenda, no expectation of resolutions or outcomes. Instead, seated in an old building in Hobart’s city centre, we talked about our work, the world, the future, searching out points of connection and intersection, discussing ways of expressing and managing the fears we were all, in our different ways, grappling with.' (Introduction)

'I try to make sense of her sudden absence but every hour, every minute, brings some new and usually terrifying development.'

'How do writers address climate catastrophe, and where do they place climate within their fictional narratives? Two writers, Anne Charnock and James Bradley, face up to this challenge in novels published in 2020. They compare notes about their different approaches in this exchange of emails.' (Introduction)

'When scientist Kate Larkin joins a secretive project to re-engineer the climate by resurrecting extinct species she becomes enmeshed in another, even more clandestine program to recreate our long-lost relatives, the Neanderthals. But when the first of the children, a girl called Eve, is born, Kate cannot bear the thought her growing up in a laboratory, and so elects to abduct her, and raise her alone.

'Set against the backdrop of hastening climate catastrophe, Ghost Species is an exquisitely beautiful and deeply affecting exploration of connection and loss in an age of planetary trauma. For as Eve grows to adulthood she and Kate must face the question of who and what she is. Is she natural or artificial? Human or non-human? And perhaps most importantly, as civilisation unravels around them, is Eve the ghost species, or are we?

'James Bradley embeds Ghost Species with his deep and humane understanding of the natural world and a profound optimism, that together we can survive and thrive.' (Publication summary)

'Mark Brandi’s 2017 novel Wimmera was one of the most impressive debut Australian crime novels of recent years. A tautly constructed exploration of the corrosive effects of masculinity, it won the British Crime Writers Association’s Debut Dagger, was named the best debut at the Australian Indie Book Awards, and was shortlisted for several other accolades.' (Introduction)

'We inhabit a moment where reality seems increasingly ­malleable, a construct that serves the interests of the powerful by eliding and obscuring the truth. From police demanding journalists submit to fingerprinting to the rejection of science by lobby groups and politicians, the control and manipulation of information has become so normalised that most of the time we no longer even notice it.'(Introduction) 

'Last summer started early in Australia. In November a heatwave struck northern Queensland, pushing temperatures to record heights in many places. In Cairns the temperature reached 42.6 degrees, more than five degrees higher than the previous record for November. Over 12 days fire crews attended more than 1200 fires, including devastating blazes in rainforest areas that had always been regarded as natural firebreaks. In parts of Queensland, fire conditions were designated catastrophic, the first time the rating - which was only created in 2009 - had been used in the state.'  (Publication abstract)