AustLit

'Frances is an artist in her forties living a quiet life in a remote mountain town in NSW, far away from the glittering lights and famous personalities of the Sydney art world she once knew. When an invitation arrives from a former lover to attend his exhibition at a state gallery, Frances is plunged back into the past, where a single irrevocable act changed the course of her story.

'Told across two time periods, Frances's story wrestles with themes of power and privilege, womanhood and motherhood, artistic doubt, the male gaze upon the female body, and the commodification of art. It looks at the fraught relationships between artists and their muses, the sacrifices of a life devoted to art, and asks if it is ever really possible for two ambitious artists to thrive in one relationship.' (Publication summary) 

'‘Just let him go.’

'Those are words Ky Tran will forever regret. The words she spoke when her parents called to ask if they should let her younger brother Denny out to celebrate his high school graduation with friends, in a neighbourhood growing more unpredictable by the day. That night, Denny – optimistic, guileless, valedictorian Denny – is brutally murdered inside a busy restaurant in the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta, a refugee enclave facing violent crime, a racist police force, and the worst heroin epidemic in Australian history.

'Returning home to Cabramatta for the funeral, Ky learns that the police are stumped by her brother’s case: several people were present at Denny’s murder, but each bystander claims to have seen nothing.

'Ky sets aside her grief and determines to track down the witnesses herself. Peeling back the layers of the place that shaped her, Ky confronts the complex traumas weighing on those present the night Denny died, and finds that the seeds of violence that led to his death were planted well before that fateful night: by colonialism, by the war in Vietnam, and by the choices they’ve all made to survive.' (Publication summary)

'Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.

'Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.' (Publication summary)