AustLit

(Publication summary)

'Irreverent, witty and wise, But the Girl is a campus novel set off campus, and a coming-of-age story about not wanting to leave your family behind

'I used to have this line I saved and brought out for grant applications and writers festivals - that having been Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Esther Greenwood all my life, my writing was an opportunity for the reader to have to be me

'Girl was born on the very day her parents and grandmother immigrated from Malaysia to Australia. The story goes that her mother held on tight to her pelvic muscles in an effort to gift her the privilege of an Australian passport. But it's hard to be the embodiment of all your family's hopes and dreams, especially in a country that's hostile to your very existence.

'When Girl receives a scholarship to travel to the UK, she is finally free for the first time. In the gilded rooms of London and then Scotland she is meant to be working on a PhD on Sylvia Plath and writing a postcolonial novel. But Girl can't stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of the people who raised her. How can she reconcile their expectations with her lived reality? Did Sylvia Plath have this problem? What even is a 'postcolonial novel'? And what if the story of becoming yourself is not about carving out a new identity, but learning to understand the people who made you who you are?' (Publication summary)

'Anam is a novel about memory and inheritance, colonialism and belonging, home and exile.

'A grandson tries to learn the family story. But what kind of story is it? Is it a prison memoir, about the grandfather imprisoned without charge or trial by a revolutionary government? Is it an oral history of the grandmother left behind to look after the children? Or is it a love story, or a detective tale?

'Moving from 1930s Hanoi through a series of never-ending wars and displacements to Saigon, Paris, Melbourne and Cambridge, Anam is a novel about memory and inheritance, colonialism and belonging, home and exile.

'Andre Dao mines his family and personal stories to turnover ideas that resonate with all of us around place and home, family legacy and expectations, ambition and sacrifice.

'Anam blends fiction and essay, theory and everyday life to imagine that which has been repressed, left out, and forgotten by archives and by families. As the grandson sifts through letters, photographs, government documents and memories, he has his own family to think about- a partner and an infant daughter. Is there a way to remember the past that creates a future for them as well? Or does coming home always involve a certain amount of forgetting?' (Publication summary)

'In my mind I walk over the land. I run my hands through the grass as if it were the hair on my head. I dig my fingers into the dirt as if the soil were the crust of my skin. Combining pages of her diary, kept through lambing seasons on a wool Merino farm on the east coast of Tasmania, with observations on the world around her, MacKellar writes a stunning thanksgiving on place, mothers, and the ways we cannot escape the elemental laws of nature. Her love for and knowledge of the land on which she lives, the lambs she cares for, and the birds she adores - illustrated in stunning line drawings through the book - are writ large.

'You will want to leap into the pages and walk beside Maggie as she saves ewes, lambs, tends to her beloved horses and dogs, and considers the challenges and joys of motherhood and farming.

'Susan Duncan on When It Rains- 'An unforgettable story of love and courage that inspires even as it breaks your heart.'' (Publication summary)

'Frances is an artist in her forties living a quiet life in a remote mountain town in NSW, far away from the glittering lights and famous personalities of the Sydney art world she once knew. When an invitation arrives from a former lover to attend his exhibition at a state gallery, Frances is plunged back into the past, where a single irrevocable act changed the course of her story.

'Told across two time periods, Frances's story wrestles with themes of power and privilege, womanhood and motherhood, artistic doubt, the male gaze upon the female body, and the commodification of art. It looks at the fraught relationships between artists and their muses, the sacrifices of a life devoted to art, and asks if it is ever really possible for two ambitious artists to thrive in one relationship.' (Publication summary) 

'The daughter of a celebrity must discover who is worthy of her devotion and who is just a fan.

'It's been twenty years since her mother was photographed, blood-soaked, outside the family home. A famous TV food personality, she fled the country. Since that time, the girl has grown up. She's bought an apartment, learned her own cooking style, fallen in love. She lives a quiet life, working as a copywriter for a health insurance company. She's found happiness, finally.

'But strange things are in the air. Her easy-going boyfriend has started sleeping with men. Her mother is selling the infamous family home. And a glamorous, pregnant neighbour has moved into the apartment downstairs, calling into question everything the girl believes about her own desires.

'How are we supposed to understand our past when all we have is our present? Do people still love us if they'd rather be anywhere but with us? And in a world of conspiracies, dubious loyalties, and mercenary impulses, how do we work out who is worthy of our devotion and who is just a fan?

'Equal parts funny and contemplative, Shirley charts a search for meaning in a world where the fracturing of ambitions - work and purpose, real estate and home, family and love - has left us uncertain how to recognise ourselves.' (Publication summary)

'Lucy has burned down her life. Robin, her new, eternally watchful friend, has never learned to inhabit his. Both have found their way to the small seaside town of Abergele, Lucy to dry out and immerse herself in obsessive research on early electronic music, Robin to stand sentinel as his grandmother dies.

'Recognising in each other a fellow exile and a rich source of distraction, they fall into step on daily rambles across the cliffs. Their charged conversations about music and philosophy function as both high-stakes flirtation and a stealthy way of processing the ways their lives have gone awry.

'Lucy recreates her old life in hothouse miniature: old friends and fascinations reappear from the city, including the charismatic and cruel Julian, the radiant concentration of all Lucy’s obsessions, and Gudrun, whose bulletproof poise makes her irresistible to all. Robin is soon drawn into these claustrophobic entanglements.

'Across endless dinners, parties and benders, the group attempt to out-perform each other, their devotion to pleasure frequently tipping into self-immolation. Exhausted by the mayhem, Robin and Lucy flee Abergele, but their compulsions prove more difficult to shake.'  (Publication summary)

At the age of ten, and just short of four feet tall, a boy from Ballarat named Johnny Day became Australia’s first international sporting hero. Against adult competition he wooed crowds across continents as the World Champion in pedestrianism, the sporting craze of the day.

'A few years later, in 1870, he won the Melbourne Cup on a horse aptly called Nimblefoot, this time impressing British royalty and Melbourne’s high society. And then, still aged only fourteen, this already-famous athlete and jockey disappeared without a trace.

'Robert Drewe picks up where history leaves off, re-imagining Johnny’s life following his great Cup win. Celebrations that night land him in the company of Prince Alfred himself and some key Melbourne identities. But when Johnny becomes a reluctant witness to two murders in the town’s most notorious brothel, he finds himself on the run again – this time from the law itself.

'In fear of his life he heads west, assuming different identities to outsmart his pursuers. Yet all the while Johnny fears his luck will soon run out.

'Johnny Day is a character that couldn’t be invented, but in the masterful re-imagining of his life Robert Drewe brings us an adventure story, a coming-of-age classic, a man-hunt, a thriller – but most of all, a rollicking good yarn. And in doing so, he lays claim to Johnny Day’s rightful place in Australia’s illustrious sporting history.' (Publication summary)

'A genre-defying, collaborative marvel that brings the absurdity of motherhood to the page.

'After sharing their artistic frustrations at the school gate, Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell decide to take a risk- to co-write a book about early motherhood. Off-colour, offbeat, off their heads, they begin - but then, what is motherhood if not messy, non-linear, multi-authored and potty mouthed?

'What results is songs, memoir, fiction, drama, poetry, letters, pregnant and lactating AI assistants texting each other. Together, Dovey and Bell create a collage of absurd mothering, failing mothering and moving mothering. They salvage the scraps of each other's lives to imagine themselves into a future where women don't always have to choose between Art and Motherhood.

'After all- these mothers are tired. They are busy. They are lucky. They talk. Perform. Categorise. Clown. They do sad dinner cabaret. They do heroic odyssey. They do motherhood the musical. They do it badly, they do it well, they do it and they do it, and they keep on doing it as women do- comically, communally, creatively. No bells and whistles, no false cheer. Motherhood as a fever-dream fantasia, a poker-faced, tragic extravaganza.

'Funny, thoughtful, vulnerable and disturbingly familiar, Mothertongues up-ends a genre and speaks motherhood anew.' (Publication summary)

'Inti Flynn arrives in Scotland with her twin sister, Aggie, to lead a team tasked with reintroducing fourteen grey wolves into the remote Highlands. She hopes to heal not only the dying landscape, but a broken Aggie, too. However, Inti is not the woman she once was, and may be in need of rewilding herself. 

'Despite fierce opposition from the locals, Inti’s wolves surprise everyone by thriving, and she begins to let her guard down, even opening up to the possibility of love. But when a local farmer is found dead, Inti knows where the town will lay blame. Unable to accept her wolves could be responsible, she makes a reckless decision to protect them, testing every instinct she has. 

'But if her wolves didn’t make the kill, then who did? And what will she do when the man she’s been seeing becomes the main suspect?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In Old Seems to be Other People, Lily Brett’s unique take on getting older is simultaneously hilarious, serious and utterly irresistible.

''I didn’t want to derail myself by thinking about my vulva and whether it was hospitable enough…’

'Most of us would like to live to an old age, but few of us actually want to be old.

'In this disarming, intimate and self-deprecating collection of vignettes about aging, Lily Brett gives us snapshots of her life in New York. After avoiding a large dog that turns out to be a fire hydrant, and mistaking a tall, grey-haired woman for her husband, Lily has to concede that her ophthalmologist is right: she does need cataract surgery. She’s transfixed by a speed-dating dinner at a local cafe, and is told they also have speed-dating dinners for seniors. In the crowded Apple store, in Soho, two young Apple assistants decide it will take both of them to help her.

'In Old Seems to be Other People, Lily Brett’s unique take on getting older is simultaneously hilarious, serious and utterly irresistible.' (Publication summary)

'A different kind of nature writing, for a different kind of landscape.

'I went and sat alone where Jimmy has been lying. It is way down in the bush. The light is soft, the air and the earth are cool, and the smell is of leaves and the river. I cannot presume to know what he is doing when he lies here, but it seems that he is taking himself back to an ecology not wrought by the terror of the fires, not fuelled by our violence on the earth. He is letting another earth heal him. 

'Philosopher Danielle Celermajer’s story of Jimmy the pig caught the world’s attention during the Black Summer of 2019­­-20.' (Publication summary)

'For readers of Station Eleven and Everything I Never Told You, a debut novel set on the brink of catastrophe, as a young woman chases the world’s last birds – and her own final chance for redemption.

'A dark past. An impossible journey. The will to survive.

'How far you would you go for love? Franny Stone is determined to go to the end of the earth, following the last of the Arctic terns on what may be their final migration to Antarctica.

'As animal populations plummet and commercial fishing faces prohibition, Franny talks her way onto one of the few remaining boats heading south. But as she and the eccentric crew travel further from shore and safety, the dark secrets of Franny’s life begin to unspool. A daughter’s yearning search for her mother. An impulsive, passionate marriage. A shocking crime. Haunted by love and violence, Franny must confront what she is really running towards – and from.

'The Last Migration is a wild, gripping and deeply moving novel from a brilliant young writer. From the west coast of Ireland to Australia and remote Greenland, through crashing Atlantic swells to the bottom of the world, this is an ode to the wild places and creatures now threatened, and an epic story of the possibility of hope against all odds.'

Source: Publisher's blurb

'India, monsoon season.

'Connor, an Australian expat with a brutal past, spends his time running low-stakes scams on tourists in a sleepy beachside town. Sasha, an American in search of spiritual guidance, heads to an isolated ashram in the hope of mending a broken heart.

'When one of Connor's grifts goes horribly wrong, it sets in motion a chain of events that brings the two lost souls together - and as they try to navigate a world of gangsters, gurus and secret agendas, they begin to realise that within the ashram's utopian community, something is deeply, deeply wrong . . .

'Racing from the beaches of Goa to the streets of Delhi to the jungles of Tamil Nadu, Sweetness and Light is an intoxicating, unsettling story of the battle between light and dark, love and lust, morality and corruption. This is an explosive and unforgettable novel that confirms Liam Pieper's place as one of Australia's finest, sharpest writers.' (Publication summary)

'A story about sexuality, the ache of friendship and love, and sticky summers at the pool, this exhilarating debut novel captures the heartbeat of one transformative summer where alliances are made and broken.

'‘I was an agent of Dan, a captive of his, really. I went where he wanted me, and did as he wanted, and for a long time, in this way, I was happy.’

'It’s been a long winter in a creaky house in Brunswick, where a young man has devoted himself to recreational showers, staring at his phone, and speculating on the activities of his best friend and housemate, Dan. But now summer is coming, and Dan has found a boyfriend and a job, so the young man is being pushed out into the world, in search of friendship and love.

'The Adversary is a sticky summer novel about young people exploring their sexuality and their sociability, where everything smells like sunscreen and tastes like beer, but affections and alliances have consequences. It asks what kinds of stories are possible – or desirable – for which kinds of friendships, and what happens when you follow those stories to their natural conclusions.' (Publication summary)

'Fifteen years after graduating from Harvard, five close friends on the cusp of middle age are still pursuing an elusive happiness, and wondering if they’ve wasted their youthful opportunities. Jules, already a famous actor when she arrived on campus, is changing in mysterious ways but won’t share what is haunting her. Mariam and Rowan, who married young, are struggling with the demands of family life and starting to regret prioritising meaning over wealth in their careers. Eloise, now a professor who studies the psychology of happiness, is troubled by her younger wife’s radical politics. And Jomo, founder of a luxury jewellery company, has been carrying an engagement ring around for months, unsure whether his girlfriend is the one. 

'The soul searching begins in earnest at their much-anticipated college reunion weekend on the Harvard campus, when the most infamous member of their class, Frederick - senior advisor and son of the recently elected and loathed US President - turns up dead. 

'Old friends often think they know everything about one another, but time has a way of making us strangers to those we love - and to ourselves....'   (Publication summary)

'Deep in the heart of Australia’s high country, along an ancient, hidden track, lives Molly Johnson and her four surviving children, another on the way. Husband Joe is away months at a time droving livestock up north, leaving his family in the bush to fend for itself. Molly’s children are her world, and life is hard and precarious with only their dog, Alligator, and a shotgun for protection – but it can be harder when Joe’s around.

'At just twelve years of age Molly’s eldest son Danny is the true man of the house, determined to see his mother and siblings safe – from raging floodwaters, hunger and intruders, man and reptile. Danny is mature beyond his years, but there are some things no child should see. He knows more than most just what it takes to be a drover’s wife.

'One night under the moon’s watch, Molly has a visitor of a different kind – a black ‘story keeper’, Yadaka. He’s on the run from authorities in the nearby town, and exchanges kindness for shelter. Both know that justice in this nation caught between two worlds can be as brutal as its landscape. But in their short time together, Yadaka shows Molly a secret truth, and the strength to imagine a different path.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.