AustLit

'Homesickness is a memoir that strives, as Emily Dickenson urged, to tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Memoirs are reconstructions that seek to capture the voice and perspective of one or more of the writer’s younger selves. Their truth claims are subject to dispute, challenge, and counterclaim. But Melbourne artist and sociologist Janine Mikosza takes a more oblique approach to her subject and the result is a soaring view of the emotional trajectory of her life and of the philosophical questions that its telling raises. When Homesickness opens, she is having cake with a nervous and sometimes hostile woman who tells her to call her Jin as ‘It’s better than Janine.’ After she gets permission from the woman to write her story, it becomes clear that the two women are different iterations of the same person: the narrator is the memoirist, while Jin is the woman who lived her childhood trauma and is still struggling to process it. The book unfolds as a dialogue between author and protagonist, with the two often at cross-purposes, as Mikosza struggles to balance writing about the past with recovering from it.' (Introduction)

'Alice Pung’s fifth book and second novel, One Hundred Days (Black Inc, 2021), deals with the difficult relationship between sixteen-year-old Karuna and her manipulative and overbearing (but also loving and hardworking) Chinese Filapino mother. Karuna’s father, who is Anglo Australian, has left the family and she has fallen pregnant to a boy she knew only briefly. The setting is 1980s Melbourne. Information is not readily accessible and hysteria about AIDS is rife. Pung tells a simple story that is rich and layered, exploring with compassion both the dysfunction and the strength of a complex mother-daughter relationship and ultimately empowering and vindicating the teenage protagonist.' (Introduction)  

'Gentle and Fierce is a book of essays that provides glimpses of Sydney author Vanessa Berry’s life by dissecting her encounters with non-human animals in various contexts – in the household, in captivity, in art and in the form of ornamental objects. Through Berry’s encounters with animals, we piece together her life as a city-dweller and an intellectual, a solitary who is as much an observer of other humans as of the animal world. Her essays allude to the destruction of the natural world and the marginalisation of other life forms by humans as Berry strives to connect with nature despite a paucity of opportunities to do so. ' (Introduction)

'Prisoncorp is the third volume in a young adult speculative fiction trilogy that engages with issues in contemporary Australian society. Marlee Jane Ward posits a near-future setting where current legal and economic trends have gone to an extreme, but which contains enough of the current features of our country to ring uncomfortably true. The first book, Orphancorp won the Victorian Premier’s Award in 2016 and was heralded as timely, in the same year that confronting footage of human rights violations in Don Dale Youth Detention Centre became public, raising questions about the criminalisation and institutionalisation of vulnerable youth.'  (Introduction)