AustLit

'Beth is intrigued by the witty and charming Miles, but perplexed by his reluctance to make love to her. When she meets Marcus, the very antithesis of Miles, they embark on a passionate and uneasy relationship. Surrounding Beth are Kyrie, her brash, sexually adventurous cousin; Nita, Marcus's mother mourning the defection of her man; and Juliet, who continually ponders her own dreams while making everyone else's come true.

'Here are people drawn together in their tentative quests for permanence, tenderness and love in an era when there are no rules about the age, gender or the faithfulness of lovers.

'It is told in the first person by “the acolyte,” Paul Vesper. The novel traces the career of a fictional Australian musician and composer named Jack Holberg. Beginning in obscurity as a piano player in Grogbusters, a dreary little Queensland town, the blind Holberg eventually gains international recognition as a composer. Vesper, who had met Holberg during his less renowned period, gives up an engineering career to serve the great man—in a sense, to become his eyes. '  (Publication summary)

'On Kristi, a tiny Pacific island jointly ruled by France and England, a group of half-castes, native Melanesians, and sympathetic colonials grab for independence and Gavi Salway, grandson of an old-time planter, is torn between loyalties.' (Publication summary)

'George Brewster is the well-dressed explorer. As his career in journalism takes him from city to city, from mistress to mistress, he takes with him his ever-patient wife. Fastidious, pompous and master of the cliche, throughout it all George persists in the illusion that he is the smartest of men.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Penguin ed.).

'In Tasmania, successful entrepreneur Nancy Best has recreated the defunct mining town of Copperfield as a glass-domed amusement park whose centerpiece is the Bluebird Cafe. The facsimile also includes a wax museum containing a statue of Lovelygod, the midget daughter born to the twins Bedrock and Carrillo Mean, who caused a sensation when she vanished without a trace 20 years before. Bedrock faithfully keeps vigil for her daughter's return, while Carrillo roams the world in search of her.

'One clear evening in 1992 all the inhabitants enter the church hall, where they are locked in and burned alive. They have been persuaded to do this by a young man called Caleb Mean - also known as El Nino, the Christ Child. The only survivors of the fire are Caleb, his lover Virginia, and their baby daughter Golden. How could such a thing happen? And why? Do the answers lie in the tragedy of the Aborigines herded over the cliffs at Cape Grimm by white settlers? Are they in the history of Skye itself, founded by the unlikely survivors of a 19th-century shipwreck? Or do they lie within the mysteries of the human soul?' 

Source: ABE Books https://bit.

'Petra Penfold-Knight, accustomed to her own way from birth, grows up to lead a religious cult whose devotees wear red shoes. The cult attracts members through Petra's magnetism, as well as by more sinister means, such as stealing baby girls from their mothers. An angel is assigned as guardian to Petra, and must continually examine his own moral position as he hovers beside the woman and observes child-stealing, violence, rape and murder committed in the name of religion. Contains descriptions of sex, coarse language, strong violence, child abuse and drug use.

'Seven people die in deep sleep therapy. A woman dies from a bee-sting on the grounds of a psychiatric clinic where inmates are encouraged to live out their delusions. A doctor rapes his patients in the Sleeping Beauty Ward.
Carmel Bird's examination of the secrets of the human mind is a chronicle of tragedy that is inadvertently revealed in the search for a lost library book. It is also a compelling portrait of a doctor whose lust for power is a form of madness.'

Source: Goodreads https://www.

'A entertaining example of the family history kind of novel. This particular family, descended from the historic Simon to begin with, has been enlivened about a hundred and fifty years ago by the irruption of a frivolous and enchanting French lady, Madeleine des. Baux. One of her grandsons, Henry, sails with his family to join a brother, Simon, who has taken up land near Port Phillip and becomes one of the makers of his colony. The marriages of his children and their cousins, and their inter-mixture with Spanish, Irish and Scots colonists, provide the matter of the book; and, since their characters are varied and whimsical, it is entrancing matter.

'Second Sight is a woman's passage from darkness to light, a journey through grief and morning to a celebration of life. It traces the experiences we all share. When we confront loss and healing, and take stumbling step towards self-knowledge.'

Source: Back cover.

'Birds of Passage is the powerful and haunting story of Seamus O'Young, an Australian-born Chinese, on a collision course with the past.

'He reconstructs his past through the eyes of Shan, an ancestor who came to Australia in the 1880s. And, just as Shan was driven from the goldfields by depravity, racism and sheer greed; so Seamus finds himself, a century later, fighting for his own life and sanity.'

Source: Goodreads.

'...always remember where you're from... To the Aboriginal Families of Mundra this saying brings either comfort or pain. To Nana Vida it is what binds the generations. To the unwilling savant Archie Corella it portends a fate too cruel to name. For Sophie Salte, whose woman's body and child's mind make her easy prey, nothing matters while her sister Murilla is there to watch over her.

For Murilla, fierce protector and unlikely friend to Caroline Drysdale, wife of the town patriarch, what matters is survival.

'A small beach resort should have been a restful place, as Charles had hoped for reasons of his own, but the human currents ran dep as the ocean's.'

Source: Blurb.

'The valley of the Dreaming Phoenix is a goal for any man of spirit who seeks happiness. The Chinese youth Salom, without family or friends, takes up the challenge.'

Source: Blurb.

'The narrator, Leon, is summoned back from a year in England to Australia, to the country house of his few remaining relatives. There he is drawn into a world that hints at drug running, at smuggling, through a woman, Annette, whose exact relationship to the household is vague. Intercut with Leon’s narrative are snatches of the life of an exploring nineteenth-century forebear, Tom.'

Source: Australian Book Review.

'The brothers Kovalenko...did not kill Jews just because they were poor and Ukrainian, and did not know any better. They killed Jews because they believed that they themselves were savages.'

'The Hand that Signed the Paper tells the story of Vitaly, a Ukrainian peasant, who endures the destruction of his village and family by Stalin's communism. He welcomes the Nazi invasion in 1941 and willingly enlists in the SS Death Squads to take a horrifying revenge against those he perceives to be his persecutors.

"Eleven year-old Floaty-boy (so named because of his passion for body-surfing and peculiar talent for buoyancy) inhabits a murky, watery world of wagging school and illicit night surfing. He hovers on the edge of things; he is in between – not boy or man – and inhabits liminal spaces: the edge of the ocean when he body-surfs and the edges of a family that seems to be spinning out of control. Vulnerable, Floaty-boy is as prey to his altered dream-like perceptions of the world as he is to the sharks that cruise in the other world of down below.

'Beneath a vast constructed/deconstructed landscape (both human and geographic) lies a labyrinth of disused mineshafts. It is a landscape in which vast saline lakes suddenly appear overnight, in which wheat babies disappear into wheat fields, in which lizards are mistaken for rocks, in which a huge grain silo becomes a cathedral and a gold front-end loader the angel of the apocalypse. It is a place where history repeats/mirrors itself and is populated by doppelganagers and we find ourselves following the after-image of the phosphene as though it was a manuscript hoping for illumination.

'From the pen of Peter Goldsworthy - a modern champion of the lost art of storytelling - comes Honk If You Are Jesus, a bestselling novel that resists categorisation, and explodes expectations. Keep your hand on the horn during this startling comic fiction.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'To the Burning City is an absorbing drama that tells of the bewildering relationship between two half-brothers, Jeb and Len, and their involvement with the past; with Len's father, Crispin Heagelow, a bomb-aimer in the 1943 Hamburg raids.

'Jeb's early awareness that Len is somehow different from other people's brothers deepens as he grows older. Gradually he comes to see Len as one of the hidden, terrible casualties of war. But what of himself?

'Set in England, Germany and Australia over a forty-year period, this is a passionate and emotionally powerful novel of family ties and filial relationships.

'Sarah Tilber has a passion for history. Captivated by the mysterious Charlie Tilber she embarks on a journey across the world, determined to uncover his secrets. But as she becomes more deeply involved in her project Sarah begins to lose her ties with the present, drifting away on the sea of the past. It is left to her friend, Jenn, to piece together the fragments of two lives and thereby uncover a haunting which stretches across the Tilber generations.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The image of Molly in her dazzling golden dress haunts three generations. Ivy, who helps Molly sew the dress from a scrap of fabric; Frank, whose love is forbidden; and Ray, who loses himself in the memories of his mother.

'When Ray disappears on the streets of Paris, his lover Martine embarks upon a search for him that takes them to unexpected places. Thread by thread, the secrets of his family unravel.

'Weaving together the past and present against a backdrop of seascapes, Sydney and Paris, The Golden Dress is a rich novel of love and secrets, memories and stories.

'This elegant and disturbing novel follows a young girl's coming-of-age in the Adelaide Hills just after the turn of the century. Thea Hodge, aged twelve, knows that young ladies should be pretty, demure and nice, but what is she to make of the mysterious and sensual Rina, the exotic sisters Love and Mercy, and her own sister Meg, whose plans for marriage and conformity go horribly wrong?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Riverslake arose out of Hungerford's period working at a migrant camp and his experiences of the bigotry and violence that the inhabitants suffered.

See also Graeme Kinross Smith on T. A.G. Hungerford in Westerly.

'The protagonist of this first-person narrative is Archimedes, also called ""Happy,'' an Irish setter who has taught himself to read and write. Archimedes guides the reader through the streets of Sydney, Australia, and expounds on human and dog life. Happy's world includes a Sydney waterfront where humans act like seagulls and seagulls take on human characteristics: there are seagull tourists, seagull art critics and seagull gay-rights activists. The eponymous seagle is different from the other seagulls, spending most of its time soaring like an eagle, and Archimedes admires it from a distance.

'In the social-realist tradition of Australian novels, this is the story of a factory - a Geelong woollen mill and the people who work there between 1950 and 1996 when the mill lies in ruins.

'Narrated by a woman called Helen Sullivan, the novel reveals the perilous working conditions through the accident which befalls a member of her family and brings her to political consciousness.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The year is 1970 and Rowena Sonner has just finished school. Torn between the expectations of her upper middle-class background and her own yearnings to experiment with life, she rebels violently against her parents and all their accompanying ethics and values.

'In search for a life of her own she realises the never-ending possibilities of change that exist for both herself and for those around her. In exploring these possibilities she discovers her own sexuality and ability to love; the importance of always fighting to preserve the things one loves and holds dear; and developing the ability to always learn from the past, and the strength and perseverance to start afresh.

'Set in Sydney in the first decade of the 1900s, Long Bay is based on the true case of a young female abortionist who was convicted of manslaughter and served out her sentence in the newly opened Long Bay Women’s Reformatory – the first of its kind in Australia. The woman, Rebecca Sinclair, was pregnant when she went to prison.

'Long Bay is a compelling fictional account of how Rebecca became involved in the burgeoning illegal abortion racket in Edwardian-era Sydney and how she was drawn into Donald Sinclair’s underworld.

'When Rachel is pregnant with Lola, she imagines motherhood will involve pushing her sleeping infant in a pram through sun-dappled parks, suffused with the purest love she has ever felt. Then she gives birth to a screaming, colicky child in a country far from home.

'Feeling isolated and unsupported, she is plagued with thoughts of hurting her daughter. This is the story of what happens next.

'Lola is angry. Lola is hungry. Lola spits the dummy that Rachel offers up, screams louder.

'Anna, a young Cypriot, has been found a husband, Yannis, in faraway Australia. Their love grows, but it is complicated by the wife's involvement with Yannis' rich brother, their fiercely traditional mother, and a young artist.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A woman sits at a desk in a farmhouse reading old letters. Africa floats in her consciousness like the Australian hills she can see from the window. Seven years ago, her younger sister disappeared near a waterfall on an African mountain range, and now, like a necromancer of memory, the woman begins conjuring up her secretive sister's past so that she can proceed with her own life.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

"The Big Fellow, Macy Donovan, who in Seedtime, the second novel of Vance Palmer's Golconda trilogy, was still in the early stages of his political career, is at the opening of this third novel of the trilogy at the peak of his powers and achievement. 

'The novel takes up his story after a gap of twenty years. Now fifty, a shrewd and experienced politician, Macy is about to step into the shoes of Wardle, the Premier, who has departed to a cosy niche in the agent-generalship in London.

'Set in the Depression, the story traces the destruction of a marriage and the choices a woman must make for a fulfilling life.'

Source: Blurb.

'A young Greek fisherman, Ilias's first experience as a migrant in Australia in the 1920s is working on the docks as a 'skeb' labourer. He attempts to make his way, learning English from his workmates as he goes. With help from his Chinese friend Harry he buys a greengrocer's shop, but this venture later fails when his regular customers prefer to buy from an 'Aussie' further up the road. Pushed by prejudice and the Depression to a Victorian country town, he finds work in a timber mill.

''He told me this much...that he's met a woman in Paris and that they'd been writing to each other. That their letters had become increasingly erotic.'

'A man who can no longer talk to his wife. His brief encounter with another woman. The beginnings of a possible affair in letters. Letters which might be turned into a novel, or a confession. There are the facts.

'But the facts begin to shift. Fiction and reality become indistinguisable in one person's search for truth and another's realisation of desire.

'"Civilization is mad and getting madder every day".

'So says Shannon Hicks in Kylie Tennant's marvellous, harsh, satiric 1943 novel. Arriving in Sydney just before WWII, Shannon, a dreamer and idealist takes on the world of politics, business, religion and men.

'The consequences are challenging and unpredictable.'

Source: Publisher's Blurb (A&R Classics).

'The Cupboard Under the Stairs tells the story of Harry White, who attempts to rebuild his life after spending six years in a mental institution.'

Source: Blurb.

'This first novel tells the story of Erika Cavanagh who has completed her translation and subtitling of the rediscovered Latvian film "The Story of the Year 1912 in the Village of Elza Darzins". But now history has caught up with her.'

Source: Blurb.

'To know is enough. To know we killed her together. I willed it, he took the blame, but we did it together. One day he'll look me full in the face and he'll sat it. He'll say: You know why it happened. Yes, I'll say, I know. The air will be noise enough, we won't need more words, but he'll say a few because I am a child. We did it because I know the secret. I am the secret.

'If Leaning Towards Infinity explored the relationship between mothers and daughters and the pursuit of mathematics, Painted Woman gives us the tight and tangled knot binding a father and daughter, and the pursuit of art.