AustLit

'I don’t want to alarm you, but if there is something you have thought about doing, whether you thought you should do it or that you might like to do it or that maybe it wouldn’t hurt to do it, if it involved moving through space across a vast distance or even a relatively short distance but one that lay outside the walls of your house, if it involved speaking to, touching or spending any length of time with someone, or touching with a bare hand something that another person may have touched, also with a bare hand, or else breathed on, or sitting in relatively close proximity to other persons while indoors and maybe even eating something while you sat in those crowded surrounds, or being in the vicinity of persons who demonstrate a clear preference for speaking in raised voices or, god forbid, shouting, then probably it would be sensible to defer that desire for now.' (Introduction)

'Smokehouse is an engagingly constructed collection of interlinked stories set in small-town, yet globally connected, settler Tasmania. The volume, which is focused on personal crises and family breakdown, is bookended by the two parts of the novella that lends the collection its name. This splicing is an inspired decision: the end of Part One keeps us turning the pages through the subsequent, fully realised short stories; with Part Two we feel rewarded whenever we spot a character first encountered in a story that seemed discrete.' (Introduction)

'In perhaps the most tender story in this textured, interconnected collection, an adolescent son spends the summer sunbathing in the backyard and sneaking glances at the paperboy while his working-class, stay-at-home father, who reads detective fiction and likes to ‘figure things out before the endings’, gently attempts to make it known to his son that he can tell him anything.' (Introduction)

'In a city locked in a kind of perpetual twilight, an antiquarian bookseller accepts a very strange commission - the valuation of a rare codex. Within its fragile pages is the story of another book, another codex, but unravelling the mystery may mean unravelling the nature of reality itself...

'A noirish mystery. A speculative fiction with a social conscience. An unbridled imagination, and a scholar's bibliomanic preoccupations. From Here On, Monsters stretches the boundaries of what we consider fiction in weird and totally wonderful ways...'

Source: Publisher's blurb.