AustLit

'Sometimes there may be more to things than meets the eye.

'Germany, 1933. Anna Winter returns home to find her father mysteriously disappeared and a note he’s left warning her of grave danger. She flees overnight, taking her precious doll collection with her, and sets sail for Australia to lose herself in the outback. She lands a job at the Birdum Hotel and carves a new life, hiding her past from the world – until a chance encounter with an eccentric stranger, Alter Mayseh, changes everything.

'Australia, 1938. A Yiddish poet fleeing persecution, Alter has seen the writing on the wall for his people. Armed with a letter of introduction from Albert Einstein, he manages his own escape from Europe and arrives in Australia in search of a safe place to call home. When fate leads him to Anna, he’s convinced he’s found his future with her. But a disturbing clue to her dark past threatens to unravel the delicate life she has built on top of the secrets left behind.

'Shifting in time and place, Doll’s Eye weaves an intriguing story of love, loss and survival against a backdrop of war and displacement. Evocative and compelling, it brings into question the gap between what we see, and what we don’t.' (Publication summary)

'An addictive, page-turning psychological thriller about a mother of one who achieves sudden fame through Instagram as a parent influencer.

'THOUSANDS OF ONLINE FRIENDS. IT ONLY TAKES ONE TO DESTROY YOU.

'Erin lives an idyllic life by the seaside with her baby boy and Australian fiancé. She's upbeat and happy - a natural mum.

'At least that's what her thousands of followers on Instagram think.

'In reality, Erin is struggling with anxiety and finding it difficult to connect with her screaming son. So, when an agent offers to make her the biggest Instamum out there, she can't refuse.

'And when Amanda, a family friend who's visiting from Australia, says she'll move in and babysit to help make it happen, it seems like the stars have finally aligned for Erin's exciting new career.

'But there's something Amanda isn't telling her.

'Something that will destroy Erin's carefully curated persona online.' (Publication summary)

'With her trademark optimism, sass, boldness and search for answers, across a collection of new and revisited essays, Yassmin Abdel-Magied explores resistance, transformation, and revolution.

'Yassmin Abdel-Magied started out a dynamic, optimistic, naive, youthful grass-roots organiser and oil rig worker and without intent, was suddenly taking on the heft of the Australian political and media establishment. She left Australia to rebuild a new life, away from family and friends, and with no employment, in London. In the UK she has been broadcasting on the BBC, consulting to multinational corporations, writing for stage and screen, and publishing successful books for young readers.

'In TALKING ABOUT A REVOLUTION, a collection of new and revisited essays, Yassmin explores resistance, transformation, and revolution. The Private and Public Self', includes essays on her crazy passions for cars, cryptocurrency and other unexpected things, as well as the personal challenges and grief around her activism and leaving Australia. She provides a hearty defence of hobbies (that are not turned into money-making side hustles), expands on the value and process of carving out a private life and self in an incredibly public facing world (linking to the concept of keeping her body private through hijab). Yassmin tackles the concept of identity when one is a forever migrant- by ancestry, and by choice. What does it mean to organise for social justice when untethered to place?

'In Systems and Society' Yassmin shares how her thinking on activism, transformative change and justice has evolved. This section contains articles on cultural appropriation, the myth of the model minority and her incredibly popular TEDx talk on unconscious bias. She challenges and interrogates the contemporary social and political landscape- on how consistently tech companies are replicating the same inequalities (and inequitable structures) online as offline, on how to bring an 'abolitionist' lens to social justice work, on the value and challenges faced by younger generations of activists who are taught to work towards 'empowerment' rather than 'power'.

'In all these essays, written with the passion, lived-experience and intelligence of someone who wants to improve our world, the concept of revolution is ever-present.'  (Publication summary)

'A compelling and compassionate debut about friendship, faith, family and identity.

''He who turns his ear away from hearing the Torah – even his prayer is an abomination.’ Proverbs 28:9

'Melbourne 1999: Ezra and Yonatan are best friends whose lives are forever changed when their school, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Yahel Academy, is rocked by a scandal and they are thrown onto two divergent paths. Twenty years later, the lives of the two men are very different: Ezra identifies as secular and atheist, while Yonatan has been ordained as a rabbi and even teaches at the academy. By chance they are reunited, and the events of their past and present collide with devastating consequences.

'Abomination lays bare the clash between religious and secular worlds in contemporary Australia and provides a revealing glimpse into a closed community. With great tenderness and insight debut author Ashley Goldberg tells the story of an enduring and evolving friendship as Yonatan and Ezra struggle to come to terms with the choices they have made, search for meaning, and forge their own identities. This is a beautifully observed, moving story from an exciting young writer.' (Publication summary)

'What could drive a mother to do the unthinkable?

'Before: Emma Cormac married into a perfect life but now she's barely coping. Inside a brand new, palatial home, her three young children need more than she can give. Clem, a wilful four year old, is intent on mimicking her grandmother; the formidable matriarch Pat Cormac. Arthur is almost three and still won't speak. At least baby Robbie is perfect. He's the future of the family. So why can't Emma hold him without wanting to scream?

'Beyond their gleaming windows, a lake vista is evaporating. The birds have mostly disappeared, too. All over Shorehaven, the Cormac family buys up land to develop into cheap housing for people they openly scorn.

'After: The summers have grown even fiercer and the Cormac name doesn't mean what it used to. Arthur has taken it abroad, far from a family unable to understand him. Clem is a fragile young artist who turns obsessively to the same dark subject. Pat doesn't even know what legacy means now. Not since the ground started sinking beneath her.

'Meanwhile, a nameless woman has been released from state care. She sticks to her twelve-step program, recites her affirmations, works one day at a time on a humble life devoid of ambition or redemption. How can she have an after when baby Robbie doesn't?' (Publication summary)

'Step through a shimmering portal . . . a worn wardrobe door . . . a schism in sky . . . into a bold new age of fantasy. When worlds beyond worlds became a genre unto itself. From the swinging sixties to the strange, strange seventies, the over-the-top eighties to the gnarly nineties--and beyond, into the twenty-first century--the VanderMeers have found the stories and the writers from around the world that reinvented and revitalized the fantasy genre after World War II. The stories in this collection represent twenty-two different countries, including Russia, Argentina, Nigeria, Columbia, Pakistan, Turkey, Finland, Sweden, China, the Philippines, and the Czech Republic. Five have never before been translated into English.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The two-time Booker Prize-winning author now gives us a wildly exuberant, wily new novel that circumnavigates 1954 Australia, revealing as much about the country-continent as it does about three audacious individuals who take part in the infamous 10,000 mile race, the Redex Trial.

'Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in south eastern Australia. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent, over roads no car will ever quite survive. With them is their lanky fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and failed school teacher who calls the turns and creeks crossings on a map that will remove them, without warning, from the white Australia they all know so well. This is a thrilling high speed story that starts in one way, and then takes you some place else. It is often funny, more so as the world gets stranger, and always a page-turner even as you learn a history these characters never knew themselves.' (Publication summary)

'First Person, Flanagan’s first novel since winning the Man Booker Prize in 2014, is inspired by Flanagan’s real-life experience ghost-writing the memoir of Australian conman Johann Friedrich Hohenberger.

'The novel is written in the first person by reality TV producer Kif Kehlman and details how Kif, as a younger, penniless writer unable to finish his first novel, agrees to ghost write the memoir of a notorious con man, Ziggy Heidl, who has defrauded the banks of $700 million.

'As work gets underway, Kif begins to fear that he is being corrupted by the con man and grows ever more uncertain as to whether he is ghost writing a memoir, or if Ziggy Heidl is rewriting him.

'At the novel’s heart is a question: what is the truth?' (Publication summary)

'An updated edition of the personal story behind the very public political face of Labor’s Anthony Albanese.

'Anthony Albanese has been at the heart of Labor politics in Australia for a decade. For the previous decade he persistently worked to ensure that the Labor left was a vital part of all ALP activities. This is his story. The turbulent years of federal politics with a deeply personal dimension, this is the whole story of Anthony Albanese and the remarkable mother, Maryanne, who raised him.

'Anthony learned his political craft among the tough men and women of NSW Labor, inheriting his mother’s devotion to social justice, the South Sydney Rabbitohs and the party his family had served for three generations.

'ALBANESE: Telling it Straight reveals what shaped the bloke they call ‘Albo’, his climb through politics by playing hard, fast and sometimes loose and how as he and his colleagues wrestled with Labor’s future, he discovered his own past.

'Now with additional material.'(Publication summary)

'Who or what is watching Jake Whyte from the woods?

'Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It's just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep - every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags.

'It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake's unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colour and sound, a story held in the scars that stripe her back.

'Set between Australia and a remote English island, All the Birds, Singing is the story of one how one woman's present comes from a terrible past. It is the second novel from the award-winning author of After the Fire, A Still Small Voice.' (Publisher's blurb)

'A novel of the cruelty of war, and tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love.

'August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.

'This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.' (Publisher's blurb)

''It was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22.00 Greenwich Mean Time when a worm entered the computerised control systems of hundreds of Australian prisons and released the locks in many places of incarceration, some of which the hacker could not have known existed. Because Australian prison security was, in the year 2010, mostly designed and sold by American corporations the worm immediately infected 117 US federal correctional facilities, 1,700 prisons, and over 3,000 county jails. Wherever it went, it traveled underground, in darkness, like a bushfire burning in the roots of trees. Reaching its destinations it announced itself: THE CORPORATION IS UNDER OUR CONTROL. THE ANGEL DECLARES YOU FREE.'

'Has a young Australian woman declared cyber war on the United States? Or was her Angel Worm intended only to open the prison doors of those unfortunates detained by Australia's harsh immigration policies? Did America suffer collateral damage? Is she innocent? Can she be saved? ' (Publication abstract)

'Olivier is a young aristocrat, one of an endangered species born in France just after the Revolution. Parrot, the son of an itinerant English printer, wanted to be an artist but has ended up in middle age as a servant.

When Olivier sets sail for the New World - ostensibly to study its prisons, but in reality to avoid yet another revolution - Parrot is sent with him, as spy, protector, foe and foil. Through their adventures with women and money, incarceration and democracy, writing and painting, they make an unlikely pair. But where better for unlikely things to flourish than in the glorious, brand-new experiment, America?

A dazzlingly inventive reimagining of Alexis de Tocqueville's famous journey, Parrot and Olivier in America brilliantly evokes the Old World colliding with the New. Above all, it is a wildly funny, tender portrait of two men who come to form an almost impossible friendship, and a completely improbable work of art.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Charlie always thought his body could be better. His employer, military contractor Better Future, has the resources he needs to explore a few ideas. So he begins to build parts. Better parts. Charlie's prosthetist, Lola, is impressed by his artificial limbs. But some see him as a madman. Others, a product. Or even a weapon.

'Existing at the intersection between mind and body, in the dawn of the age of pervasive technology, Machine Man is a gruesomely funny tale about one man's quest for the ultimate in self-improvement.' (From the publisher's website.)

'In their trusty fishing boat Genevieve, armed with a flame thrower and limited ammunition, a small group of officers and men take a stand against the might of the German army after the fall of France in World War II. This is classic Shute: at once a thrilling adventure that will keep you on the edge of your seat, and a heartbreaking tale of the ravages of war.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (2009 Vintage ed.).