AustLit

'From international bestselling author of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, Holly Ringland, comes a haunting and magical novel about joy, grief, courage, and transformation.

'The last time Esther Wilding's beloved older sister Aura was seen, she was walking along the shore towards the sea. In the wake of Aura's disappearance, Esther's family struggle to live with their loss. To seek the truth about her sister's death, Esther travels from Tasmania to Copenhagen, and then to the Faroe Islands.

'On her journey, Esther is guided by the stories Aura left behind in her treasured journal: seven fairy tales about selkies, swans and women, as well as cryptic verses Aura wrote and had secretly tattooed on her body.

'The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding is about the far reaches of sisterly love, the power of wearing your heart on your skin, and the ways life can transform when we find the courage to feel the fullness of both grief and joy.' (Publication summary)

'The most enchanting debut novel of 2018, this is an irresistible, deeply moving and romantic story of a young girl, daughter of an abusive father, who has to learn the hard way that she can break the patterns of the past, live on her own terms and find her own strength.

'An enchanting and captivating novel, about how our untold stories haunt us - and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.

'After her family suffers a tragedy, nine-year-old Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak.

'Under the watchful eye of June and the women who run the farm, Alice settles, but grows up increasingly frustrated by how little she knows of her family's story. In her early twenties, Alice's life is thrown into upheaval again when she suffers devastating betrayal and loss. Desperate to outrun grief, Alice flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. In this otherworldly landscape Alice thinks she has found solace, until she meets a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man.

'Spanning two decades, set between sugar cane fields by the sea, a native Australian flower farm, and a celestial crater in the central desert, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart follows Alice's unforgettable journey, as she learns that the most powerful story she will ever possess is her own.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Australian writer HOLLY RINGLAND recovers her sense of wonder on a writing retreat in Oxford led by Kate Forsyth.'

'On the South-West boundary of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, in the centre of Australia, an unmarked red-dirt track turns left off the Lasseter Highway. For the few kilometres still within park lines it's known as Docker River Road. Beyond that point it becomes Tjukaruru Road, leading to Western Australia through Aboriginal freehold land.' (Publication abstract)

'What happens when a collection of writers are given a picture, a word limit and the freedom to see where an image can take them? Playing on an old adage, Picture 1000 Words is a unique pictorial short story anthology that experiments with the process of writing while simultaneously celebrating an enigmatic collection of photographs by Cam Cope. Thirteen writers have produced original, highly personalised 1000 word compositions that the reader explores together with the creative processes the authors have been through to write them. Does the reader see what the writer sees? Or do they find something else hidden in the visuals? Intriguingly the authors were not told the real-world origins of the images before penning them. So where do they come from? To satisfy curiosity, Cope provides an index with the real world captions behind the photos so readers can see how far from the truth the pens did fall. ' (Publication summary)