AustLit

(Publication summary)

'Two men, Robert and Vras, met in 1993 and formed a committed relationship until Robert's death of leukemia in May, 2022. This short book is a farewell letter to Robert, a long lamentation and a threnody, exploring the nature of their friendship, their own transformation over time and finally the unexpected event of death. In the letter, Vras unfolds the expression of grief and loss after their pledge to 'grow old together' didn't eventuate.

'He recollects their shared experiences and encounters while presenting a relationship which brought together affection, intimacy, eros and friendship. Without idealisation or escapism, this confessional letter pays homage to the power of human emotions and the destiny formed by the will of lovers to be together, until death tore them apart and, perhaps, beyond death.' (Publication summary)

'Interweaving fiction and memoir in multiple threads, Thistledown Seed follows the displacement and violence of the Holocaust for a Polish family who subsequently settle in Western Australia. In this deeply moving account, Louise Helfgott explores another side of her family’s tragic past made famous in the Oscar-winning movie, Shine. The floating thistledown seed is like the diaspora of the Jewish people who were scattered around the world as a result of the Holocaust. '  (Publication summary)

'Our lives with non-human animals are characterised by a kind of unremitting contempt. Habits of life, traditions of thought, and failures of imagination have rendered us blind to their invitations to companionship within a shared world. And philosophy has offered little to assuage our moral incomprehension, our soul blindness. Over the last few decades, it has fallen increasingly to novelists, like J.M. Coetzee, and poets, like David Brooks – artists whose language has slipped the leash of ‘pure reason – to awaken us to the possibility of a moral encounter with non-human animals. Brooks’ Turin is truly a startling achievement. It startles us from an impoverished slumber, leaving us wondering how we could have been so blind to the gentle presence, the insistent voices, the sly wisdom, the subtle reproach, the offers of friendship held out by our non-human companions. The world cannot help but look different once Brooks rips away the veil of our all-too-human conceit.'  (Publication summary)

'Time Flies is an idiosyncratic memoir with a distinctive voice and a sense of the absurd: a wistful, reflective, sometimes comic view of a childhood in a remote mining village in Southern Spain, the dislocating shock of a Scottish boarding school education, and a remarkable introduction to working life in London at Time Out then at Virgin, both at the peak of their maverick self-confidence. A tireless spokesman for the company, and an improbable mouthpiece for the Sex Pistols at the time of their greatest fame and vilification, he later went on to produce numerous notable films, several classics among them.'

Source : publisher's blurbl

'Reg Mitchell is a modest, decent man with a gift for designing fast aeroplanes. Two horrors seek him out – terminal illness, and Nazi Germany’s predicted invasion of his country. His response will change the course of world history.

'“Here is a splendid love story of maker for machine: an inventor’s single-minded devotion to his imperilled country, and to the fighter plane that he hopes will save it. Winton Higgins handles the origin story of the Spitfire with the surefootedness of the historian, and eloquence of the poet. His drama of creation is made all the more poignant by its backdrop of destruction: the collective destruction of war, and the personal destruction of the cancer that Mitchell attempts to outpace just long enough to get the job done.” Sarah Knox, author of the Orphan Gunner.

'“If you love aeroplanes – and even if you don’t – this book is a must. There is a saying among pilots ‘if it looks good it will fly well’ and there can be no better example than the Supermarine Spitfire, the graceful and deadly British superhero of World War II. The Spitfire evolved into a fighter plane that could out-climb, out-run, out-turn and out-fight anything in the sky. Pilots didn’t like the Spitfire, they loved it. Winton Higgins has written a fluent and brilliantly researched story of the Spitfire’s designer Reg Mitchell, and the creation of a unique classic aircraft. Spellbinding!” Peter Grose, author of A Good Place to Hide.'

'Joyce Kornblatt’s novel, Mother Tongue, begins with a shocking discovery.  In a powerful fiction that reads like a true story, the details of the crime and its aftermath unfold. 

'In mid-life, Australian fiction-writer Nella Pine learns that she was kidnapped as an infant from a hospital in the United States, taken to Australia and raised there by the woman she knew as her mother, but who was actually her abductor.  “When I was three days old, a nurse named Ruth Miller stole me from the obstetrics ward in Mercy Hospital and raised me as her own. This was May 7, 1968, in Pittburgh, Pennsylvania.”

'In four compelling voices, the mystery of Nella’s kidnapping—why was she taken?  how was the secret kept for so long?  who is the family from which she was stolen?—emerges.  

'Mother Tongue invites the reader to participate with these memorable characters as they unfold the impact on them of a terrible crime.  We learn how they have been scarred and strengthened. And we see how history—the Holocaust, Australian adoption policy, the flight of refugees to safety– continues to reverberate through the generations.'

Source: publisher's blurb

'The collection of stories is the imaginative recreation of the experience of living on Glebe Point Road, in Sydney for over thirty years. Through the encounters of the unidentified writer with actual individuals, the author evokes unsuspected episodes and quirky moments from the lives of countless ordinary or sometimes extraordinary people.

'The book is structured around such fleeting snapshots depicting moments of compassion, despair, love, as well as death, evil and despair.

'The narrative is in both prose and poetry as ‘the two zones of being’ are fused: the everyday and the common leads to the transcendental and the outlandish.

'The book transforms Glebe Point Road into a universal landscape of fall, transfiguration and redemption, in which a respectable professor from Sydney University, a larrikin book-seller, a Belgian coffee maker, a British back-packer, a Greek expatriate, an eminent religious leader, a Vietnam veteran, a suicidal poet, a religious trans-sexual, an Iraqi-Jewish doctor, a failed politician, a child of the stolen generation, a visionary museum-curator, a window-cleaner, a renegade scholar, a self-indulgent young poet, a ferocious old Nazi, a lonely British woman, an unrepented Catholic mother, a New Zealand bushido fighter, an artist, his wife, a transgender assassin, a dying poet, a Chinese dry-cleaner and many more wrestle simultaneously with their angels and demons and are all defeated. Out of the actualities of their life, the writer wants to extract the myths that all these characters unconsciously embody. The Road itself takes active part in their existence. Finally, they all ‘get the blues’ a cosmic melancholy which the poems in the book, a hybrid genre of psalms and odes, desire to articulate.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A Lasting Conversation: Stories on Ageing explores many aspects of ageing including resilience and defeat, satisfaction and regret, excitement and fear, love, loss and laughter. These stories are written from various perspectives, including older women and men, their daughters and sons, grandchildren and observers. They present a fascinating picture of what it is to grow old as an Australian. Each story is infused with acute observations and wry humour.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The Grass Library is a philosophical and poetic journey that recounts the author’s relationship with his four sheep and other animals in his home in the Blue Mountains. It is both a memoir and an elegy for animal rights.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The Budapest Job by Alice Spigelman is a fast-paced thriller that builds to a dramatic revelation. A young architect arrives in Budapest in 1989 on a project, the year Communism is collapsing. He becomes embroiled in a secret police operation amidst the political turmoil of the times as he tries to track down the person who murdered his father in 1953 during the Stalinist years.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Skywriting – making radio waves is at once the captivating story of contemporary Australian cultural life and a personal biography of an acclaimed ‘radio poet’,whose signature radio features and documentaries on ABC RN have creatively conveyed ideas, personalities, and places.Timely and revelatory, it draws on the experiential riches of life in radio times from the youthful foment that rocked ABC airwaves in the 1970s until the advent of podcasting. Skywriting ventures beyond the institution and invisible theatre of radio to enchant the mind’s ear of readers with evocative portrayals and luminous portraits: chalking ‘Eternity’ on the midnight streets with artist Martin Sharp; examining the afterlife of poet Vicki Viidikas and photographer Carol Jerrems, artistic bright sparks of the author’s generation; to name just a few. It’s a love letter to the radio feature, a unique form of storytelling that has explored and contributed to shaping our culture, and whose story has not been told until now. Links are provided to downloadable companion audio.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Marcel Weyland's new translations in this anthology of Tuwim's poetry are a triumph of a kindred spirit who shares with the Poet his sense of semantic experiment and emotional adventure rarely seen in the world of poetry. Mr Weyland managed yet again. Through his exceptional gift of poetic empathy and intuition, he managed to put another Polish poet into global circulation, claiming for Julian Tuwim his rightful place in the Pantheon of world literature.' (Publication Summary)

'Part II :1938-39 establishes the friendship of Cusack and Franklin which develops during their collaboration on the scandalous sesqui-centennial satire Pioneers on Parade. In Part III:1945-47, Cusack and James, both burnt out at the end of WWII, set up a writing retreat in the Blue Mountains and collaborate on their prizewinning bestseller expose of wartime Sydney, Come In Spinner.

In Part IV: 1947-49, James returns to London and Cusack follows through the revisions demanded by the Daily Telegraph before they will award the thousand pounds prize money. Cusack is also researching her "tuberculosis novel" Say No To Death. All That Swagger is published by Angus & Robertson whilst Franklin endures her nephew's war neurosis and makes her final Will, providing for an annual [Miles] Franklin Award. In mid-1949 Cusack leaves for Europe.

'In Part V:1950-55 the Cusack-Franklin-James friendships are now essentially carried through their correspondence; Come In Spinner is published to press acclaim in London, with Cusack's Say No To Death, Southern Steel and Caddie following in quick succession. Angus & Robertson finally began publishing the "Brent of Bin Bin" series. James, now divorced, rearing two daughters, begins work with London publisher Constable & Co as a reader and talent scout for Australian writers. Franklin and Cusack's friendship provides the emotional fulcrum for this final Part.

'The Chronology (1879-2001) provides the facts of the lives and works; the Biographical Notes provide an inventory of most of the cast of characters who appear in the letters.'(Publication summary)

'It’s Spring, 1870. The kindly Polish baker and widower, Ignacy Wadowski, cannot get his new young wife Jadwiga to make love with him. Ignacy asks a friendly Jewish healer who lives in the forest, for something to make him more attractive, but unexpectedly gets a potion that, while its effect lasts, makes him young again. Now courting Jadwiga as the youthful stranger Adalbert, Ignacy wins her love. The key moral dilemma is, while Ignacy is now enjoying his lawful wife, she’s enjoying a man she thinks isn’t her husband. Can one of them sin and the other not? The scheme begins to unravel when village gossip arises with sympathy for Ignacy - who’s being cuckolded by himself. The novel becomes an allegory, not just of all marriage and its difficulties, but of the expansion of consciousness available to a humble man, taking him into unsuspected realms of history, literature, national destiny and moral confrontation.' (Publication summary)

"These letters provide a remarkable, bird's eye view of the friendship, courtship and love of two `colonial intellectuals' played out in Melbourne, London and Brisbane. Their deep interest in knowledge, ideas and culture shapes their growing commitment to each other - their letters bring a relationship to life and capture a time. The tentative and increasingly passionate youthful correspondence sets the scene and tone for a life-time of collaboration and activism. Reading these moving and tender letters is a timely reminder of the enduring nature of love, the value of partnership, and the importance of engaging with the world." Professor Julianne Schultz, editor of Griffith Review

"The great originality of Deborah Jordan's collection of Vance and Nettie Palmer's love letters is that it shows us not just the private life-the desire, the love, the searching for self-behind the public life of two of Australia's most significant literary figures but the private in the public life and the public in the private life, revealing how their private and public selves were intimately entangled." David Carter, Professor of Australian Literature and Cultural History, University of Queensland

"The Palmers were prolific letter writers and their observations on the people around them, their social and cultural circumstances and the natural world make for rich reading. We are privy to the emotional, intellectual, political and spiritual development of one of the most significant partner - ships in Australian literary history, that of Janet (Nettie) Higgins and Vance Palmer." Elaine Lindsay, author of Rewriting God: Spirituality in Contemporary Australian Women's Fiction

'Anna Taylor is found with her throat cut at a high-stakes research laboratory where results are driven by ambition and greed. Adam Gabriel, an Oxford pathology professor, uses his diagnostic and forensic skills to determine how the murder was committed and at the same time reveals the none too virtuous world of modern Oxford "town and gown" where murder is not just possible but almost inevitable. Palindrome is a cerebral detective novel which focuses on a forensic crime.' (Publication summary)