AustLit

'Morgan McBride is tough as nails – but a surprise mail-order bride is enough to have him quaking in his cowboy boots in this laugh-out-loud historical romance.

'The oldest of the McBride siblings, Morgan has had to look after his siblings since Ma died and Pa ran off. It hasn’t always been easy, especially when his heart longs for the solitude of the wide open road. But now that his brother Kit is married and settled, the time is right for Morgan to leave in search of adventure. Little does he know that Junebug, his hellcat of a little sister, is dead set on keeping him at home – all with one honest advertisement in The Matrimonial News.

'Epiphany Hopgood has always been good at doing the wrong thing. She’s too tall, too loud, too opinionated, and too contrary for polite society. Staring down the barrel of spinsterhood, she decides to answer a seemingly straightforward ad for a bride.

'But when Pip shows up to meet her betrothed, she finds that Morgan McBride is not the husband she expected. In fact, he doesn’t even want to be a husband. Unwilling to return to her unsupportive family, Pip is determined to take control of her own future – with or without Morgan McBride.' (Publication summary)

'The consequences of climate change weigh on all of us, especially as we face an El Niño summer, with floods and fires already making themselves felt in the Australian environment.' (Introduction)          

'My dying wish is for you to finish my bucket list. I refuse to die without knowing this list will be completed. And I refuse to die without knowing my family will be okay . . .

'Jodie Boyd is a shy and anxious twenty-something, completely unsure what to do with her life. Her older sister, Bree, is an adventurous, globe-trotting, hugely successful Instagram influencer with more than a million followers. She's the most alive person Jodie knows--up until Bree's unfathomable, untimely death from Leukemia. The Boyds are devastated, not to mention overwhelmed with medical debt. But Bree thought of everything--and soon, Jodie is shocked by a new post on her sister's Instagram feed.

'The first of many Bree recorded in secret, the post foretells a jaw-dropping challenge for Jodie: to complete Bree's very public bucket list. From "Fly over Antarctica," to "Perform a walk-on cameo in a Broadway musical," if Jodie does it--and keeps all Bree's followers--a corporate sponsor will pay off the staggering medical debt. If she gains followers, the Boyds won't be the only ones to benefit. It's crazy. It's terrifying. It's impossible, immoral even, to refuse. So, despite the whole world watching, Jodie plunges in, never imagining that in death, her sister will teach her how to live, and that the last item on the list--"Fall in love"--may just prove to be the easiest.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

(Publication abstract)

'He has many names. They call him Deathrider, White Wolf, The Plague of the West. He's the ice-eyed killer of the plains; the ghost of the trail; the restless spirit who haunts the frontier from California to Missouri, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. They say he seeks vengeance for his murdered people; they say he never sleeps; they say he moves silently through the night and changes form to run with the wolves. And that he is as beautiful as Lucifer.

'At least, so they say. Ava Archer wouldn't know; she's never seen him. But that doesn't stop her from writing about him. The Plague of the West is her bread and butter, and after more than a dozen dime novels, she thinks she probably knows Deathrider better than he knows himself, even if she wouldn't recognize him on the street. If only rumors of his death would stop getting in the way of a good story...

'Those damn stories make Nathaniel Rides With Death's life an absolute misery. Thanks to his unwanted notoriety, he's hunted like an animal by an endless stream of gunslingers looking to make a name for themselves. When someone close to Nate is shot by one of the gunslingers, Nate decides it's time to hunt down the novelist at the root of all his troubles. He has a plan to end this farce once and for all...'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Emma Palmer's been a lady of the night and a gambler, a thief and a blackmailer, a liar and a peddler of sin. But mostly a lady of the night. She's spent most of her life as the hard-as-nails, smart-talking 'Seline', working her way across the country to the goldfields of California, where she can finally ply her trade on her own terms. And she's a darn good Madam, if she does say so herself. Her place is clean, her booze is cheap, and her bedrooms are fancy. But when a would-be patron won't take no for an answer, she's forced to fight for her life and run. And what better disguise than as a nun?

'Tom Slater is a taciturn cattleman at the tail end of a long, hard season on the trail. He plans to have a quiet winter at his old family homestead in Mexico. What he doesn't plan on is finding a foul-mouthed nun stranded in the middle of nowhere. She has sly green eyes and a way of looking at him that turns his head upside down. Tom doesn't need to be trailsman to know that this woman will only lead to trouble.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'WANTED: A resourceful frontiersman, for the purpose of matrimony...

'When Georgiana Bee Blunt advertises for a husband, she's not looking for a handsome man, or a smart man, or a charming man. What she wants is a brute. A no-nonsense, capable backwoodsman who won't trouble her with talk of love; she just wants someone to get her and her fatherless children safely to California. Matt Slater seems to fit the bill perfectly. The man looks like he could wrestle a bear and not even break a sweat. The only problem is he doesn't want a wife. Well, not the only problem...

'Truth be told, Georgiana has more problems than she knows what to do with. Left holding a gold claim by her not-so-dearly departed husband, Georgina finds her eldest son held ransom by the sinister Hec Boehm and his henchmen, and herself facing a journey of more than two thousand miles to rescue him. With four children in tow. And no nanny.

'All Matt Slater wants is to be left alone. He's spent most his life on his lonesome in the wilderness, and he's comfortable that way. But then a widow with big blue eyes and the tenacity of a buffalo turns his entire life upside down, and before he knows it, he's playing caretaker to a pack of kids...and trying not to succumb to their mother's charms.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Mobilizing Jacques Derrida's concept of the "trace" and Funder's reference to trains in the text, we position Funder as a moving vessel, traversing geographies (both physical and psychological) as she seeks to contain memory. Since the initial publication of Stasiland in 2002, it has attracted a great deal of praise and aroused some controversy. Funder tells the story of East Germans affected by the Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi (an acronym for the German Staatssicherheit), effectively the "secret police" wing of the GDR government, an organization whose name has become shorthand for an insidious, totalitarian form of surveillance and punishment (Grieder xvii ). Funder speaks with the harassed and the harassers, years after the reunification of Germany, immersing herself within the narrative, creating a work that is equally about the lives of Germans as it is about Funder's experience: her day-to-day life in the country researching the text and her writing process. Brison suggests in her work that when "trauma narratives" are "witnessed," or listened to, they become "speech acts of memory," which work as "re-making the self' (39). [...]these fictions that have previously been destructive to one's psyche can be reworked and effectively reclaimed:'  (Publication abstract)

'A rollicking, funny historical romance of mistaken identity, wagon trains and an irresistible attraction

'Alexandra Barratt has found the perfect man – it's a shame he thinks she's a boy.

'Fleeing from the murderous Grady brothers with a stolen fortune hidden in her luggage and her younger brother and sister in tow, Alex disguises herself as a boy to join a wagon train headed West ... a wagon train captained by the irresistible Luke Slater.

'At first, Alex can't believe the way every woman in town falls at Luke's feet, including her suddenly flirtatious sister. But when she sees him naked in the bathtub, she finds herself swooning over him too. If only she could wash the muck of her face and show him who she really is...

'As for Luke, he has no idea that the ragtag boy in his care is none other than the woman of his dreams. But when circumstances connive to throw Luke and Alex into each other's arms, their relationship becomes very complicated indeed. In fact, with the brutal Silas Grady in pursuit, keeping their secret becomes a matter of life and death...' (Publication summary)

'In 2011, Amy T Matthews published End of the Night Girl with Wakefield Press, a novel which engages creatively with questions of identity politics and the ethics of fictionalising the Holocaust. In Navigating the Kingdom of Night, Matthews contextualises End of the Night Girl in terms of the critical debate surrounding Holocaust fiction.

The critic Theodor Adorno once famously proclaimed that ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. He made this proclamation in 1949, at a time when high-ranking Nazis faced the Nuremberg Trials; when the world was watching newsreels of bodies in pits and walking skeletons in striped pyjamas; when the Holocaust was a recent, raw and stunning event; and when the victims faced a disbelieving world and the perpetrators a divided, beaten and shamed homeland. Adorno’s statement, made so soon after the horrors, still resonates today and can be applied critically to all imaginative literature about the Holocaust.

Critics, historians and Holocaust survivors have argued for decades over whether the Holocaust should be accessible to fiction and, if so, who has the right to write those fictions. Navigating the Kingdom of Night addresses such concerns and analyses various literary strategies adopted by authors of Holocaust fiction, including the non-realist narrative techniques used by authors such as Yaffa Eliach, Jonathan Safran Foer and John Boyne and the self-reflexivity of Art Spiegelman. Matthews frames the discussion by self-examining her experience as an author of a Holocaust fiction.' (Publisher's blurb)