AustLit

''You clamber up, heading for the exit, the circle of faint light, as the radiance of the pre-dawn leads you on toward freedom. I follow. You spread your darling wings. You enter the net that awaits you.'

'Bold, tender, and often fantastical, Love Letter to Lola enters the very pain of loss and grief while preserving a wise, sly, humorous, and ironic point of view. The thylacine, the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the blue macaw are all candidates to return from extinction, and here each is given its own moving narrative. The meaning of the British monarchy is challenged by a green spider; a unicorn and the rainbow serpent contemplate the end of the world; an angel gives his perspective on human life and love with a thoughtful and exquisite mischief. The author's own 'Reflection' on the inspiration and the construction of the stories is a swift and penetrating conversation on how writing happens.

'Carmel Bird won the Patrick White Award for Literature in 2016. She has published novels, short stories, and non-fiction, her 2022 memoir Telltale foregrounding her Tasmanian origins, as well as her lifelong interest in the natural world, and in reading and writing. The Stolen Children - Their Stories, which she published in 1998, is an early landmark work in the promotion of indigenous issues. Love Letter to Lola is the latest offering of an author who is known for the sharpness and originality of her narratives.' (Publication summary) 

'Among the literary honours awarded to Gregory Day is the 2021 prize from The Nature Conservancy Australia. A profound commitment to the future of the planet as well as a passion for all forms of music and language and a keen awareness of the truths of Indigenous culture form the fabric of his soaring, astonishing new novel.' (Introduction)

'Salonika Burning, the ninth novel from Gail Jones, is an enthralling narrative that transports readers to the battlefields of Greece in 1917. Jones, whose book The Death of Noah Glass won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2019, is one of Australia’s most distinguished and highly awarded writers. This latest novel, like much of her work, brings the settings and dramas of the past into sharp and vivid focus.' (Introduction)   

'Angry and enthralling, this novel challenges the reader’s understanding of what a novel might be.'

' One of the beauties of historical fiction lies in its ability to peel back layers of accepted “facts” in order to dramatise events as they might have been. Robert Drewe is a master of this technique, and something of a magician who delights in delivering the jolt of the reveal. Fascinated by an 1866 faded sepia portrait of a small 10-year-old Australian boy, Johnny Day, displayed in the National Library of Australia, the author began researching the boy’s history. The photograph is reproduced in his novel, Nimblefoot.' (Introduction)

'‘I was confined, locked into my library, tracing my heartbeats from way, way back.’ 

'In Telltale, Carmel Bird seizes on the enforced isolation of the pandemic to re-read a rich dispensary of books from her past. A rule she sets herself is that she can consult only the books in her house, even if some, such as the much-loved Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, appear to be stubbornly elusive. Her library is comprehensive, and each book chosen – or that cannot be refused – enables an opening, a connection to people, time, place, myth, image, and the experience of a writing life. From her father’s bomb shelter to her mother’s raspberry jam, from a lost Georgian public library with ‘narrow little streets of books’ to the memory of crossing by bridge the turbulent waters of the Tamar River, to a revelatory picnic at Tasmania’s Cataract Gorge in 1945, this is the most intimate of memoirs.

'It is one that never shies from the horrors of world history, the treatment of First Nations People, or the literary misrepresentations of the past. 

'Original, lyrical, and hugely enjoyable, Telltale, with its finely wrought insight and artful storytelling, is destined to delight.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Almost the first thing you find in Mothertongues is a QR code to the soundtrack that singer–songwriter Keppie Coutts created to be part of the reading experience. This work, co-written by Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell, is in a category all its own, exploring the living concept of motherhood across a multitude of forms that move from whisper to cacophony, from tragedy to hysteria. It’s sweet and sour. Ivory tower academic meets music hall meets melody.' (Introduction)

'Countess who? Mary Annette Beauchamp was born in Kirribilli in 1866. She married a German count, acquiring the name “von Arnim”. When she published her first book in 1898, Elizabeth in her German Garden, the author was simply “Elizabeth”, but these days her 22 books are all attributed to Elizabeth von Arnim. She grew up in England from the age of three, and lived in Europe and America, dying in South Carolina in 1941.' (Introduction)

'Carmen Callil was born in Melbourne in 1938 and since 1960 has lived in England where in 1973 she founded Virago, a vigorous feminist publishing house. The original Latin meaning of ‘‘virago’’ was ­‘‘female warrior’’, but the term has acquired strong overtones of ‘‘angry witch’’.' (Introduction)

'We’re thrilled to continue this series of extracts from recent Australian books with an extract from award-winning author Carmel Bird’s latest novel Field of Poppies.'