AustLit

'In playwright and social worker Mick Cummins’ debut novel, So Close to Home, we meet eighteen-year-old Aaron Peters in the throes of heroin withdrawal. An ‘incoming tide of pain’ causes him to shiver in warm rooms; noise becomes unbearable, drowning out the possibility of coherent thought. The novel continues to introduce us to a cast of supporting characters, who each flit in and out of Aaron’s life. The constant is his mother, Vicky, a hairdresser who we learn has kicked her son out of the family home because of his drug use. They see each other on occasion; Cummins sketches out tender scenes where Vicky cuts Aaron’s hair or washes his clothes. Then there’s Samantha, a schizophrenic ‘hanger-on’ who is partnered to Dave, Aaron’s neighbour at the boarding house where he resides. Dave is also a heroin user, as is Zoe—a single mother fighting to regain custody of her child.' (Introduction)

'The narrator of Libby Angel’s autofiction novel Where I Slept is an entropic force. A self-described poet, she dances on a razor’s edge between destitution and transcendence: busking and bin-diving, sleeping in filthy toilets on train carriages—a neo-vagabond of sorts. Moving between government subsidised flats and boarding houses, squats and brothels, she propels herself into counterculture Melbourne from a regional centre she calls Tidy Town. She doesn’t tell her artist friends she grew up there, remaining a mystery to her cohabitors as they drink and take drugs, sleep too much or not at all, paint mandalas on ceilings, put on shows in decommissioned factories. Artifice and artistry, pleasure and pain collide as we follow Angel’s protagonist through a series of evictions.' (Introduction)

'As a child, I sometimes went to a church where there was a crying room for children; the glass panes were strong enough to muffle the audience’s crying sounds. It would reflect them back tenfold at the crier, but would rarely silence them. The same stifled anguish is evoked in Gretchen Shirm’s The Crying Room, a collection of interwoven stories that mix speculative and realist fiction. The prevailing structure is resemblant of a mood board, a pastiche of scenes with a distinct atmosphere, as the main characters inhabit a cavernous, melancholic state compounded by the inward pressure of compressing their feelings into a performance of normality.' (Introduction)

'Clairaudience, says the Macquarie dictionary, is the alleged power of hearing voices of ‘spirits’, or sounds inaudible to normal ears. The protagonist of Why We Are Here is not a psychic, but she is an aspiring dog-whisperer, and her landscape is punctuated with muted strains of grief as she mourns the loss of her father and partner during the pandemic. In the absence of others, she ‘hears’ the voices of her loved ones. Her partner is deified in biblical pronouns, with ‘He’ and ‘His’ capitalised. ‘I never met Him then, but I love, love, love that child,’ she writes of her partner’s young self. Her father, also, has a distinct voice and character that weaves into BB’s narration. With her dog, a subtle inversion takes place. The name BB derives from the Spanish ‘Bebe’, which also means ‘baby’. BB’s voice is acerbic and tender, wryly observant, unmistakeably human. Baby the dog’s voice comes in staccato spurts of commands, evocative of the dialogue from The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay. The exception to this is a surprisingly affecting monologue by Baby at the conclusion of Why We Are Here. ‘I know that I was not always like this,’ the dog telegraphs.' (Introduction)

'Childhood is a formative experience. And reading can be a transformative experience; between the lines and shelves of books there are spaces to inhabit and new ways to metamorphose. I found myself thinking about the contours of these experiences while reading Shannon Burns’ Childhood, which felt invigorating and courageous, at times breathtaking in the execution. Burns has the past interacting with the present with graceful uncertainty, tracing rifts and voids in memory. Often in life-writing there is a sense of mining the past, processing and refining its contents into a narrative that seems irrevocable and crystal-clear, leading to conclusions that point to redemption. Instead, many of the events detailed in Childhood remain uncertain due to the nature of their origin.' (Introduction)

'Tucked in the bay of Teralina/Eaglehawk Neck is a checkerboard of rock carved from the land by the tide’s ebb and flow. The sea chemistry is eroding the stone bed and inscribing a mosaic of polygonal shapes that look almost man-made, as time falls away against the elements, slowly dissolving into the ocean. The Octopus and I, a debut novel by Tasmanian writer Erin Hortle, emerges from these shifting layers of memory, immersing the reader in a keen sense of place that emphasises the interconnection between humans and animals. It explores ideas of surface, touch and depth with an intimate and personal voice; challenging the stories we tell ourselves and the way we fit into the landscapes we inhabit. As its characters are placed in the context of the intersecting violences of colonisation, climate change and extinction, the novel reflects on the Tasman Peninsula’s bloody history and interrogates our responsibility to a warming world.' (Introduction)