AustLit

'The false cold of the theatre makes it hard to imagine the heavy wind outside in the real world, the ash air pressing onto the city from the nearby hills where bushfires are taking hold.

'The house lights lower. 

'The auditorium feels hopeful in the darkness. '

'As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play.

'Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone.

'As the performance unfolds, so does each woman's story. By the time the curtain falls, they will all have a new understanding of the world beyond the stage.' (Publication summary)

'The past shapes the present – they teach us that in schools and universities. (Shapes?  Infiltrates, more like; imbues, infuses.) This past cannot be visited like an ageing aunt. It doesn’t live in little zoo enclosures. Half the time, this past is nothing less than the beating heart of the present. So, how to speak of the searing, unpindownable power that the past – ours, our family’s, our culture’s – wields in the present?

'Stories are not enough, even though they are essential. And books about history, books of psychology – the best of them take us closer, but still not close enough.

'Maria Tumarkin's Axiomatic is a boundary-shifting fusion of thinking, storytelling, reportage and meditation. It takes as its starting point five axioms:

• ‘Give Me a Child Before the Age of Seven and I’ll Give You the Woman’
• ‘History Repeats Itself…’
• ‘Those Who Forget the Past are Condemned to Repeat It’
• ‘You Can’t Enter The Same River Twice’
• ‘Time Heals All Wounds’

'These beliefs—or intuitions—about the role the past plays in our present are often evoked as if they are timeless and self-evident truths. It is precisely because they are neither, yet still we are persuaded by them, that they tell us a great deal about the forces that shape our culture and the way we live. 

'Axiomatic is Tumarkin's fourth book of non-fiction, and her most pioneering. Her three previous books, Otherland  (2010), Courage  (2007), and Traumascapes  (2005), have each and all been critically acclaimed and shortlisted for major prizes.

'More than seven full and long years in the making, and utilising her time as a Sidney Myer Creative Fellow, Axiomatic actively seeks to reset the non-fiction form in Australia.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'An elephant?’ Arthur gasped. ‘In your house? But... is it real?’

'Olive leaned a little closer and lowered her voice. 

'‘Well, that's the thing...’

'Olive’s father has a sadness so big that she imagines it as a large grey elephant following him around. With the help of her cheery grandfather and her best friend, Arthur, Olive sets out to chase away her father’s elephant.

'Beautifully written, this novel from acclaimed author and illustrator Peter Carnavas will stay with you long after you finish.' (Publication summary)

'Sebastian is at a university open day with his best friend Tolly when he meets a girl. Her name is Frida, and she's edgy, caustic and funny. She's also a storyteller, but the stories she tells about herself don't ring true, and as their surprising and eventful day together unfolds, Sebastian struggles to sort the fact from the fiction. But how much can he expect Frida to share in just one day? And how much of his own self and his own secrets will he be willing to reveal in return?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Heads and Tails by John Canty is an extraordinary children’s picture book. Leveraging the natural and universal fascination that children have with animals, the book utilises hints and recognition to build a sense of anticipation on each page, that is resolved on the following page when the identity of the animal is discovered.

'Young readers are engaged in the process of deduction by drawing on visual prompts and clues such as where an animal may live, what the animal may look like and sounds the animal makes. The effect is that each page presents an engaging yet accessible mini mystery for the child to solve. Accordingly, the young reader’s inevitable participation in the process of discovery is ensures the book’s enjoyment. ' (Publication summary)

'You can only see my tail, what insect am I? Heads and Tails: Insects is a playful follow up book to the highly successful Heads and Tails.

'At first we can only see their tails. Some clear, simple clues add detail as we learn more about each one. Now, can you guess the insect that each tail belongs to?' (Publication summary)

'It really all started with The Pain. He officially came into my life exactly nine weeks and one day before our Year Ten Graduation Dance. And despite my very best efforts to wipe the day from my mind, I can still remember it clearly. It was a Friday. The thirteenth day of the month. Notice anything there? Maggie Butt is facing not only a stranger taking over her mother's life but her own as well, and she is not going to let that happen. But then there's the one-eyed snaggle-toothed cat, senior subject choices, the dream date and Cyber Boy, the geek in the library to contend with as well. Its going to be an interesting year.' (Publication summary)

'Some of the world's favourite authors each contribute a chapter in the life of the mysterious George "Gee" Keane, photographer, soldier, adventurer and enigma. Under different pens, a startling picture emerges of a man who magically connects the lives and times of young people around the world...'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Ishmael is back at St Daniel's for another year of misadventure, with his best mate Razz determined to set him up with dream-girl, Kelly. But before Ishmael can win her heart, he has to overcome a mortifying pool incident, a nasty knock-out and getting caught red-handed with Kelly's diary. Ishmael's only hope lies with his Dad's rock band, but can the Dugong's set everything right?' (Publication summary)

By the time ninth grade begins, Ishmael Leseur knows it won't be long before Barry Bagsley, the class bully, says, "Ishmael? What kind of w'ussy-crap name is that?” Ishmael's perfected the art of making himself virtually invisible. But all that changes when James Scobie joins the class. Unlike Ishmael, James has no sense of fear—he claims it was removed during an operation.

Now nothing will stop James and Ishmael from taking on bullies, bugs, and Moby Dick, in the toughest, weirdest, most embarrassingly awful . . . and the best year of their lives.' (Publication summary)

'The year is 1947. The great fire of the Second World War has convulsed Europe and Asia. In its wake, Aldred Leith, an acclaimed hero of the conflict, has spent two years in China at work on an account of world-transforming change there. Son of a famed and sexually ruthless novelist, Leith begins to resist his own self-sufficiency, nurtured by war. Peter Exley, another veteran and an art historian by training, is prosecuting war crimes committed by the Japanese. Both men have narrowly escaped death in battle, and Leith saved Exley's life. The men have maintained long-distance friendship in a postwar loneliness that haunts them both, and which has swallowed Exley whole. Now in their thirties, with their youth behind them and their world in ruins, both must invent the future and retrieve a private humanity.

'Arriving in Occupied Japan to record the effects of the bomb at Hiroshima, Leith meets Benedict and Helen Driscoll, the Australian son and daughter of a tyrannical medical administrator. Benedict, at twenty, is doomed by a rare degenerative disease. Helen, still younger, is inseparable from her brother. Precocious, brilliant, sensitive, at home in the books they read together, these two have been, in Leith's words, delivered by literature. The young people capture Leith's sympathy; indeed, he finds himself struggling with his attraction to this girl whose feelings are as intense as his own and from whom he will soon be fatefully parted.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In the early eighteenth century, a woman finds herself set adrift from a mutinous ship and cast ashore on a remote desert island. There she finds shelter with its only other inhabitants: a man named Cruso and his tongueless slave Friday. In time, she builds a life for herself as Cruso's companion and, eventually, his lover.' (Source: Libraries Australia)

"From the author of Waiting for the Barbarians, another startling and disturbing portrait of today's South Africa, a land and a people beset by violence and siege. Coetzee here tells the story of a handicapped young man who has worked as a municipal gardener in Cape Town. His mother is dying, and she wishes to return to her birthplace out in the veldt. Without the required transit passes, mother and son set out on a journey that will end in death for her and in a new but temporary life on an abandoned farm for him. His respite in isolation and peace does not last long, however; grotesque reality soon returns to trouble this quiet new world. Against the solitude of this private drama, Coetzee paints an eloquent and pained picture of his homeland and of the bureaucrats, doctors, army deserters, and camp guards who reveal the stress and qualms of their existence and who uneasily sense that there is no conclusion to their troubles and no future for their lives." (Source: Libraries Australia)