AustLit

'Blue Mist Café is a book of short stories and some poems tied together by the goings on in the café. On the ground floor there is the proprietor who works the coffee machine while he expresses his opinion on any subject, fortunately with a broad humour. There are two floors. The top one is stacked high with thousands of books and, it is said, a ghost that minds them. It is at table fifteen upstairs where A. C. Llewellyn finds her stories. They are memories from her long life, tales told her by friends and family, cosmological thoughts and the occasional enchantment of the books on the café shelves. Between the stories there is the breather of a short poem – well – most of them are short.' (Publication summary)

'The Hermit is dead but his guilt lives on in his children – guilt which stems from the ivory box he found in India during WW2 and the orphan he gave it to.

'Does the ivory box hold the power to send mad whoever owns it? Or, if they are too strong, send mad their most loved one? Most people think that’s nonsense, but they hold an element of doubt.

'The ever-practical Dee also thinks it’s nonsense, but even she wavers at times. The only person who has no doubt is the artist Alice and her insistence that Dee solve the mystery follows a thread of family fortune starting with the birth of Thomas, in 1730, and ending in a surprising conclusion nearly three centuries on.

'In The Hermit and the Ivory Box, Penny Blackwell creates a mysterious back story for one of the early characters featured in her first book, Loki’s Joke.' (Publication summary)

'Loki’s Joke is Penny Blackwell’s autobiography. Written in the style of a novel, it shows how she spent the first sixty years of her life fighting to be happy inside the male body she was born with. It follows her journey from rejection of her true identity through to its final acceptance and resolution.

'Loki’s Joke is much more than just another transgender or sex-change story. Certainly that influence runs throughout, but the story shows how only slowly did the author realise how the identity problem was influencing every decision and every aspect of her life.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.