AustLit

'Have you ever dreamed of fleeing your current life and spending weeks or months or even a year living on an island in the Mediterranean? This is what Susan Johnson longed for and did, taking her mother with her to the Greek island of Kythera. Reading Johnson’s new memoir Aphrodite’s Breath while taking myself off for a month of writing near Naples was my second experience of living in a synchronicity of sorts with Johnson.' (Introduction)

'The fifth book from Chloe Hooper, an accomplished author of fiction and nonfiction, is in part a bedtime story told across many nights to her two sons, and in part a meditation on how stories – ancient and modern – might sustain or fail us during dark times.' (Introduction)

'Dear Dr Chekhov tells the imaginary story of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov’s epistolary friendship with Phoebe Jane Phillips, a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who lived on Lady Elliot Island, on the Great Barrier Reef. The action takes place while Chekhov is at work on cold Sakhalin Island, an island that lies just north of Japan.' (Production summary)

'Sydney. 2008. Pre-GFC.

'Forced into an early retirement due to illness, Sam Rosen has lost any semblance of control over his life. His wife, Rhonda, confined to the carer role, is feeling her identity ebb slowly away as her former life retreats further and further into the past.

'Their eldest son Mark is over-invested and as he lurches towards financial disaster, he can't bring himself to tell his wife Ingrid that they're losing money fast.

'Middle child Liza has always been independent and content to scrape through on her child-care worker's wage in one of the most expensive property markets in the world. But when her biological clock goes off, she's out of time in a city where men are thin on the ground and grown-up ones even scarcer.

'Baby of the family Jemma thinks that being mild-mannered will let her pass through life unharmed. And then, one night, everything changes.

'Fast and funny, Hopscotch charts a year in the lives of the endearingly flawed Rosen family, and holds up a mirror to contemporary urban life in Australia, interrogating our endless capacity for self-destruction, longing and love, and asks why we think we could ever find happiness in a city that's roaring with dysfunction.'

'During the early years of European habitation Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour was a grim place of incarceration and punishment - for convicts, for orphan and wayward girs, for homeless and orphaned boys.

'Jane Messer was intrigued by the history and presence of the island, which she passed each day in a ferry on her way to and from school. She found it formidable, romantic and full of mystery. Her story intertwines two themes; the brutal internment of men and children and the lyrical quality of the waters of Sydney Harbour.

'Marina is 14 years old and dreams of escape from the island prison. She's a keen and sensitive observer of the privations and sorrow which surround her but has a rich inner life in which freedom is just out of reach, just over the waters. Perhaps the mermaids of her imagination will help her reach the further shore.'

Source: ABC Radio National's Airplay website, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/airplay/
Sighted: 19/02/2007