AustLit

'Delia Rabbit does not paint anymore. Yet when her son Charlie goes missing – dredging up memories of Delia’s sister, Bo, who also disappeared when they were teenagers – she picks up her brush once again, as if she can magic him back through art.'  (Introduction)

'Kokomo, Victoria Hannan’s much-anticipated debut novel, opens with an ode to a penis.' (Introduction)

'“In London, where Nina lived, it was the time of foxes.” So begins Australian author Jo Lennan’s book of short stories. But if In the Time of Foxes starts like a fairytale, it reads more like a treatise on the grittiness – the small disappointments, the big injustices, as well as the joys – of everyday life.'  (Introduction)

'Blanchett’s star-powered TV series Stateless explores the repercussions of immigration detention. ‘None of us are interested in preaching to the converted,’ she says.'

'The blurb for Cherry Beach, Melbourne-based author Laura McPhee-Browne’s debut novel, reads like the most tired kind of chick lit. It promises melodrama – in the form of lifelong friendships torn asunder, unrequited love and men gone bad, all set to the tune of “dark undercurrents” – albeit with a queer twist.' (Introduction)

'Elliot Perlman’s new novel, Maybe the Horse Will Talk, centres on a fable that the protagonist, one Stephen Maserov, tells his sons. In the story a tyrannical king decides he no longer finds his jester funny. Realising his life is at risk, the jester offers the king a compromise. Give me a year and your best horse, he says, and I will show you something extraordinary. I will teach the horse to talk.' (Introduction)

'Before Brett Whiteley died from a heroin overdose at 53 — alone, in a dingy motel room on the New South Wales coast — he lived like a rock star. He was Australia’s hedonist hero, a painter of grand and voluptuous canvases who hung out with Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Dire Straits.' (Introduction)

'About a third of the way through This Excellent Machine, its teenage protagonist, Clem, finds himself in a cafe on the wrong side of town. This is a place where the footpaths are black, because “they’d waited too long to hose down the vomit”. Where anonymous doors lead to underground tattoo parlours and where hand-scrawled signs advertise “massage by the ½ hour”.' (Introduction)

'“School, as everyone knows, is where books go to get sterilised,” writes Nam Le in his essay On David Malouf, part of Black Inc’s “Writers on Writers” series. But if a classroom can sound the death knell for a love of literature, Le does the opposite in this intellectually rigorous monograph. Less literary critique than a personal exploration of race, politics and art, it sees Le using Malouf as a springboard for his own meanderings and thoughts. These range from Le’s days as a student, cast out for his love of words, to his apprehensiveness at being used as a spokesperson for refugee issues: a default for many due to the fact that he and his parents arrived in Australia by boat.' (Introduction)

'Road trips, as epitomised by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, can be a way to unfetter and unbind. Not in Carrie Tiffany’s Exploded View, though, where a car is described as little more than a “moving coffin”.' (Introduction)

'Nicola Redhouse’s memoir traverses neuroscience and psychoanalysis in a quest to understand her own mind.'

'Into the Fire may sound like a thriller or a lurid true-crime story. But while Sonia Orchard’s novel features a death and a mystery, it is, at heart, more of a tale of the ups and downs of female friendship than a whodunit.' (Introduction)

'If The Book Thief is the Australian author’s most famous book, this is his magnum opus.'

Source: Blurb.

'With One Hundred Years of Dirt a runaway success, the author talks about class in Australia and why his book hit a nerve.'

'In a rehearsal room here earlier this year, actors were doing a walk-through of the stage adaptation of “The 91-Story Treehouse,” a best-selling children’s book. In the magical world the play creates, two well-meaning, if haphazard, protagonists live in a multistory treehouse where they try to write a story, but keep getting distracted by villains.'  (Introduction)

'In “The Shepherd’s Hut,” Tim Winton finds poetry and beauty in the
country’s interior saltlands and in a young teenager hardened by life.'

'Bruce Pascoe and Stephen Page tell how a joking remark led to Bangarra’s latest production.' 

'Young girls who presented to hospital literally choking from the horror of September 11 have been given voice in a startling Australian production.' 

'Before Andy Griffiths, the best-selling children’s book author, turned 30 and started writing full-time, he was a teacher who often found even the simplest of tasks a struggle in self-control.' (Introduction)

'Soon to be ninth chief of his Torres Strait islander tribe, Bani brings his family on stage to keep his culture – and our laughs – alive.'