AustLit

'Ida, a secondary school teacher in Melbourne with a four-year-old daughter, Aster, in childcare, lives in a post-Covid world of masks, mindfulness apps, remote learning, and video calls. Recently relocated from New Zealand when her partner, a lecturer in Cultural Studies, is offered a more prestigious job at an Australian university, she has relinquished the possibility of continuing her own academic career. He seems unwilling to share household tasks or help to tend to their child, despite the fact that they are both working, and distances himself by immersing himself in his study and going on long runs. In the opening passage, we are presented with Ida’s childhood memory of being on a beach, where she pretends that she knows how to swim – or rather, that she has learned ‘how not to drown’ – which now seems an apt metaphor for her marriage.' (Introduction)

'In the swampy heat of a Brisbane summer in 1986, a young bookshop assistant tries to solve a fifty-year-old mystery involving Inga Karlson, a legendary New York author who died in a warehouse fire in 1939. Caddie Walker, the bookseller, is idealistic enough to believe that books can change people’s lives. Perhaps they can: literally, and in unexpected ways.'  (Introduction)

'A short way into this intriguing novel, author Ruby J. Murray cites Virginia Woolf on the subject of biography. According to Murray’s protagonist, Woolf called it ‘a plodding art’: ‘Every life, she wrote, should open with a list of facts … a stately parade of the real. Births, deaths and marriages. Broken limbs, acquisitions, graduations, wars. Any interpretation of the facts, she said, is fiction. But the facts remain.’'  (Introduction)

'Randolph Stow was one of the great Australian writers of his generation. His novel To the Islands – written in his early twenties after living on a remote Aboriginal mission – won the Miles Franklin Award for 1958. In later life, after publishing seven remarkable novels and several collections of poetry, Stow’s literary output slowed. This biography examines the productive period as well as his long periods of publishing silence.

'In Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow, Suzanne Falkiner unravels the reasons behind Randolph Stow’s quiet retreat from Australia and the wider literary world. Meticulously researched, insightful and at times deeply moving, Falkiner’s biography pieces together an intriguing story from Stow’s personal letters, diaries, and interviews with the people who knew him best. And many of her tales – from Stow’s beginnings in idyllic rural Australia, to his critical turning point in Papua New Guinea, and his final years in Essex, England – provide us with keys to unlock the meaning of Stow’s rich and introspective works.' (Publication summary)

'Four days before Christmas in 1920, Dorothy Mort shot her lover dead in cold blood. The tragic end to her affair with dashing young doctor, cricket star and War hero, Dr Claude Tozer, scandalised Sydney. Dorothy’s respectable husband was devastated.

'Following a trial that mesmerised the public and sent the media into a frenzy, the troubled North Shore mother of two and budding actress was declared ‘not guilty on the ground of insanity’.

'After nine years in Long Bay Gaol, Dorothy was released and returned to live quietly with her husband . . . But was she really mad, or bad, or neither? And what was the secret that her husband kept for the rest of his life?

'In an absorbing blend of investigative non-fiction and biography, Suzanne Falkiner delves into the case that has intrigued Sydney for almost 100 years.' (Publication summary)

'In 1910 a young Englishman, Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson, joined anthropologists A. R. Brown and Daisy Bates on a Cambridge University-sponsored expedition to Western Australia to record Indigenous marriage customs.

Profoundly affected by his experiences there - for him the desert was a frontier of rare and remote beauty - he also developed a deep respect for the people he encountered among its Aboriginal communities.

Back in Europe, and encouraged by such luminaries as Joseph Conrad and Gertrude Stein, Grant Watson began writing fiction.

Initially filtered through the analytical lens of his scientific training, his observations of the Australian landscape came to figure as a recurring metaphor for spiritual isolation and notions of the unconscious in his novels.

The Imago is a revealing portrait of this singular and intriguing writer, a pioneer of literary themes explored decades later by Katharine Susannah Prichard, Randolph Stow and Patrick White.' (Publisher's blurb)

'In 1939, young Joan Falkiner's spirited flight from South Yarra to princely India and her marriage to the Muslim ruler of a small state in Gujarat sent shockwaves through Melbourne society. Political reverberations were felt throughout the Raj and – as the kingdoms were about to disappear forever in the maelstrom of Indian Independence – as high as the British throne. How did it all come about? Through conversations in Melbourne, Mumbai and the South of France, research in the India Office Library in London, and the author's personal journey while travelling in modern India, Suzanne Falkiner traces the course of a most unusual love story. ' (Publication summary)

'93 kilometres northeast of Cooktown lies one of Australia’s most beautiful and secluded resorts—Lizard Island. Mary Watson was 21 years old and had been married less than two years when, in early October 1881, after mainland Aborigines had attacked two workmen at her absent husband’s beche-de-mer station, she set herself adrift in a cut-down ship’s water tank with her baby, Ferrier, and a wounded Chinese servant, Ah Sam. They died of thirst on an island over 60 kilometres away, some eight days after their departure.

'At Cooktown it was assumed that Mary Watson had been kidnapped and killed, and when the bodies were found some time later they were returned for a funeral which became Cooktown’s biggest public event, uniting the town in appreciation of her undaunted spirit. Mary Watson, whose diary describing their last days was found with the remains, became an emblem of pioneer heroism for many Queenslanders.

'In the meantime, however, a terrible retribution had been visited on the local indigenous people, whom the police were quick to assume had been responsible for the deaths.'

(Source: author's website)

'From the rich and shadowy interior of an old house overlooking Sydney harbour, a granddaughter recreates in her imagination the elusive story of the grandmother she never met: Ethel, a woman passionately involved in literature politics and love, but ultimately thwarted in all three. Unexpectedly, a world of dramatic secrets and almost forgotten scandal emerges from beneath a veneer of apparent propriety.'

(Source: author's blurb)