AustLit

'From the 2022 David Unaipon winner comes an outstanding and timely collection of speculative fiction imagining futures where Indigenous sovereignty is fully reasserted.

'In this stunningly inventive and thought-provoking collection, Mykaela Saunders poses the question—what might country, community and culture look like in the Tweed if Gooris reasserted their sovereignty?

'Each of the stories in Always Will Be is set in its own future version of the Tweed. In one, a group of girls plot their escape from a home they have no memory of entering. In another, two men make a final visit to the country they love as they contemplate a new life in a faraway place. Saunders imagines different scenarios for how the local Goori community might reassert sovereignty - reclaiming country, exerting full self-determination, or incorporating non-Indigenous people into the social fabric - while practising creative, ancestrally approved ways of living with changing climates.

'Epic in scope, and with a diverse cast of characters, Always Will Be is the ground-breaking winner of the 2022 David Unaipon Award. This is a forward-thinking collection that refuses cynicism and despair, and instead offers entertaining stories that celebrate Goori ways of being, knowing, doing - and becoming' (Publication summary)

'A world-first collection of blackfella speculative fiction from well-known and emerging First Nations writers. The first-ever anthology of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander speculative fiction – written, curated, edited and designed by blackfellas, for blackfellas and about blackfellas. In these stories, some writers are summoning ancestral spirits from the past, while others are looking straight down the barrel of potential futures, which always end up curving back around to hold us up from behind. Dazzling, imaginative and unsettling, This All Come Back Now centres and celebrates communities, cultures and country.' (Publication summary)