AustLit

Swallow the Air follows the life of 15-year-old May Gibson, an Aboriginal girl from New South Wales whose mother commits suicide. May and her brother go to live with their aunt, but eventually May travels further afield, first to Redfern's Block in Sydney, then to the Northern Territory, and finally into central New South Wales. She travels to escape, but also in pursuit of a sense of her own history, family, and identity.

'''Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

'Tolstoy wasn't thinking specifically of the Harrison family when he wrote those words, but maybe he should have been. George Harrison is twenty-eight and afraid of the dark. His father is dead and his mother lives in la-la land. Reeling from a broken heart, and still coping with the trauma of a childhood home invasion, George works in a dead-end job in a bowling alley and finds rare solace in the giant painting of an alien that sits outside his room. His brother Matthew isn't much better off. After losing the love of his life in a traumatic car accident, he's retreated into a private world of sleep where he dreams about falling in love with comedienne Magda Szubanski.

'Matthew and George are each stuck in their own little messed-up world, with no idea how to get out, and neither of them is sure whether their unhappy family will ever finally pull together, or simply just fall apart.' (Publisher's blurb)