AustLit

'A restless woman upends her world, abandoning her domestic inertia to seek refuge in a foreign hemisphere. Purposefully unsettled on the labyrinthine streets of London, she assembles a new routine amid the afterglow of a story from a century earlier. A traumatised widow, doubly bereaved, threw herself into the icy Thames. A shell-shocked soldier, heading home from war, gave himself to the depths to save her. Now disoriented by slippages in time as well as place, the woman begins imagining her own presence in the lives of these two strangers entwined by fate. But as her days blur together, as her intrigue becomes obsession, and as her sympathies grow to encompass all manner of souls lost to water — drowned, shipwrecked, cast adrift, or driven to the poles of the planet — she feels her restlessness returning with all the power of a tide in flood.

'In this mesmerising début novel, Anna MacDonald finds a language of perpetual motion for an almost static experience of interior life. Lyrical, lilting, and melodious, her gentle words rise into rhythms that surge forth, then break and recede, leaving treasures in their wake. Hers is the poetry of alienation embodied: corporeal and sensory, spatial and recursive, making magic from a tilt of the head, a turn of the gaze, a stride, a halt, an interplay of gesture and orientation. In her dizzying proliferation of spirals and orbits, trajectories and bearings, her every sentence is a search for traction on a world that bewilders anew with every daily revolution.' (Publication summary)

'In her essay On Beverley Farmer, Josephine Rowe recounts a 2013 visit to Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art to see an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’s Late Works. Among the drawings and sculptures on display was The Waiting Hours, described by Rowe as ‘a series of twelve small oceanscapes’ each of which shifts fluidly, a ‘darkening whorl around the small white axis of a singular source of light shrunk to a pinhole … at once a pivot point and a vanishing point’. The effect on Rowe of this encounter was ‘one of powerful undercurrent. I felt not much and then, abruptly, disconsolate. Swept out of depth. A plunge, a plummet: the inrush towards that oceanic sense of recognition experienced most commonly in dreams, but sometimes spilling over into waking life – encounters in art and music, in nature or, more rarely, in meeting (as though hello, again).’' (Introduction)

'Honeybee, Craig Silvey’s highly anticipated new novel, his first since Jasper Jones (2009), chronicles the coming of age of fourteen-year-old transgender narrator Sam Watson, who was assigned male at birth. This is a story of desperate loneliness and fear, of neglect, family violence, betrayal, and self-disgust. But it is also one of love and solidarity, a celebration of the kindness of strangers who become family and friends.' (Introduction)

'Favel Parrett’s tender new novel, There Was Still Love, explores what it means to make a home and how a person might be free in a world ruptured by political as well as personal upheavals. Moving backwards and forwards in time (from 1981 to 1938) across vast distances – from Prague to Melbourne, via London – between first- and third-person narrators, past and present tense, Parrett beautifully captures one family’s complicated twentieth-century inheritance.' (Introduction)

'Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s novel Beautiful Revolutionarychronicles the decade leading up to the Jonestown massacre in Guyana when Jim Jones, founder of the Peoples Temple, orchestrated the ‘revolutionary suicide’ and murder of more than 900 members of his congregation, as well as the assassinations of US Congressman Leo Ryan, a delegation of journalists, and a defector from ‘the Cause’.'  (Introduction)

'This speculative novel is of the Zeitgeist. S.A. Jones imagines a civilisation of women – the Vaik – committed to ‘Work. History. Sex. Justice.’ Although they live apart, in ‘The Fortress’, there is a history of exchange between the Vaik and the outside world. All women are entitled to Vaik justice if they have been violated and, according to a treaty that includes ‘biological guarantees’, Vaik are ‘granted access to men and sperm’. Thus, The Fortress accommodates men: national servicemen; ‘isvestyii’ who, having committed crimes against women and girls, are sentenced to life (and death) at The Fortress; permanent residents; and ‘supplicants’. These men work – in the fields, the kitchens, etc. – and must consent to the Vaik ‘direct[ing] the uses of [their bodies] at all times’.' (Introduction)

'Set in England during the Big Freeze of 1962–63 – the coldest winter in nearly 300 years – Robert Lukins’s first novel tells the story of Radford, who is sent to live at Goodwin Manor, ‘a place for boys who have been found by trouble’. The Manor is overseen by Teddy, a charismatic depressive, who resists pressure to establish a ‘philosophy’ of reform and instead determines ‘only to keep [the boys in his care] alive’.' (Introduction)

'A Scandal in Bohemia: The life and death of Mollie Dean is Gideon Haigh’s engrossing account of the circumstances surrounding the unsolved 1930 murder in Elwood of primary school teacher, aspiring journalist, and bohemian, Mollie Dean. Less true crime journalism than an interrogation of the genre, Haigh’s meticulously researched book recalls the ‘thick description’ of cultural history, which in historian Greg Dening’s words conveys ‘the fullness of living’ at a particular time, in a particular place. In this instance, the time and place are Melbourne in the 1920s and 1930s and, more specifically, the ‘virtual Melbourne Bloomsbury’ (as it is described by biographer and memoirist Gary Kinnane) of the group of artists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals with whom Mollie Dean became entangled. This group included chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Hart, The Bulletin’s Mervyn Skipper and his wife, Lena, poets Louis Lavater and Frank Wilmot, writers Bernard Cronin and Vance and Nettie Palmer, and artists Max Meldrum, Clarice Beckett, Justus Jorgensen, and Colin Colahan among others.' (Introduction)

'In this dark historical novel, Garry Disher imagines a world in which small girls are sold by their desperate families and enslaved to men such as the brutal ‘scrap man’ – ‘a schemer, a plotter, a trickster’ in whom ‘nothing ... rang true except rage and self-pity’ and who profits from the labour of womenfolk known as Wife, Big Girl, You, and Sister. Neither the scrap man, nor the women shackled to him, are named because ‘names had no currency in the scrap man’s family’ until, in an act of defiance, You secretly christens herself Lily.'  (Introduction)

'In this inventive début novel, Pip Smith recounts the multiple lives of Eugenia Falleni, the ‘man-woman’ who in 1920, as Harry Crawford, was convicted of murdering his first wife, Annie Birkett. Smith employs various types of text–sketches, newspaper articles, witness statements – alongside third-person accounts – to embroider an archive rich in narrative possibilities. The story moves from Wellington, New Zealand, in 1885 to Sydney in the first half of the twentieth century. Each of Falleni’s multiple selves (Nina, Tally Ho, Harry Crawford, Jack, Gene, and Jean Ford) tells his or her own first-person story. In this way, the structure of the novel conveys Falleni’s perpetually shifting identity.' (Introduction)

'Within the last decade, a new wave of writers has emerged whose work is indebted to W.G. Sebald. Sebald’s name, become an adjective (‘Sebaldian’), is often used as shorthand for describing a writer’s approach to history and memory, or his or her use of images alongside word-text, or the presence of a peripatetic narrator, or the rejection of conventional generic categories such as ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’. Edmund de Waal, Valeria Luiselli, Teju Cole, Jáchym Topol, Erwin Mortier, and Katherine Brabon, to name a few, have all been critically associated with the German author.'(Introduction)

'The Birdman’s Wife is about passion, obsession, and ambition. Narrated by Elizabeth (Eliza) Gould, the novel relates her marriage to, and creative partnership with, zoologist John Gould. Opening with their meeting at the Zoological Society of London in 1828, Eliza’s narrative charts the years of her collaboration with Gould – including the time spent in the Australian colonies classifying and illustrating the native birdlife – as a result of which she came to be celebrated ‘not just [as] a wife and mother’, but as a zoological illustrator in her own right.'

(Introduction)