AustLit

'‘Once upon a time when wishing still helped ...’

'Return to the dreaming streets of the cathedral-city of Lodellan, where a new generation of characters face fairy tales and nightmares. Cordelia Parsifal has an enviable life, hard won, but the ghosts of the past are soon to remind her that no sin or omission goes unnoticed. Slumbering saints awake, hind-girls dance, boys become bears, and the fate of the upper- and under-earths rests on the whim of a single, volatile creature.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Orphaned as a young child, Mirin O'Malley has been brought up by her grandparents on their isolated, rambling estate Hob's Hallow. Long ago her family prospered due to a deal struck with the mer, the terrifying creatures who live in the depths of the sea: safety for their merchant ships in return for a child of each generation. But for many years the family have been unable to keep their side of the bargain and their fortunes have suffered as a result.

'When Mirin's grandfather dies, her grandmother puts in train a plans to restore their glory - but at the price of Mirin's freedom. Finding amongst her grandfather's papers evidence that her parents may still be alive, Mirin is determined to escape and discover the truth about her origins. This takes her on a treacherous journey to Blackwater, the estate her parents built when they fled Hob's Hallow, but on arrival Mirin finds the estate in decline and her 'Uncle Edward' in charge: where are her parents, and who is this Edward Elliott really?

'A story of mystery and magic and the strange creatures that lurk beneath the waves.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'‘The people of Incognita have walled themselves in…’

'House of the Flight-helpers by Tasmanian author Philomena van Rijswijk is a strange and satirical narrative, a mythological mosaic of horrors, feather phobias, dead saints, clay flutes, terrible birds, Border Monkeys, forbidden zones and unsettling forebodings. It casts the reader into the future, a future left trammelled by the glacial passage of xenophobia and exclusion. It is a parable of sorts, and considers the biggest questions and insecurities of our age, one of the most poignant of which is: when we exclude the outsider, are we, in fact, imprisoning and impoverishing ourselves?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Welcome back to the magic and pathos of Angela Slatter’s exquisitely imagined tales.

'The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings returns to the world of Sourdough and Other Stories (Tartarus, 2010), introducing readers to the tales that came before. Stories where coffin-makers work hard to keep the dead beneath; where a plague maiden steals away the children of an ungrateful village; where poison girls are schooled in the art of assassination; where pirates disappear from the seas; where families and the ties that bind them can both ruin and resurrect and where books carry forth fairy tales, forbidden knowledge and dangerous secrets.'