AustLit

'The false cold of the theatre makes it hard to imagine the heavy wind outside in the real world, the ash air pressing onto the city from the nearby hills where bushfires are taking hold.

'The house lights lower. 

'The auditorium feels hopeful in the darkness. '

'As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play.

'Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone.

'As the performance unfolds, so does each woman's story. By the time the curtain falls, they will all have a new understanding of the world beyond the stage.' (Publication summary)

'This novel is about a woman called Martha. She knows there is something wrong with her but she doesn't know what it is. Her husband Patrick thinks she is fine. He says everyone has something, the thing is just to keep going.

'Martha told Patrick before they got married that she didn't want to have children. He said he didn't mind either way because he has loved her since he was fourteen and making her happy is all that matters, although he does not seem able to do it.

'By the time Martha finds out what is wrong, it doesn't really matter anymore. It is too late to get the only thing she has ever wanted. Or maybe it will turn out that you can stop loving someone and start again from nothing - if you can find something else to want.' (Publication summary)

'In Gunk Baby, we join Leen just as she opens an ear-cleaning and massage salon at the Topic Heights Shopping Complex. Soon she starts to notice increasingly odd behaviour around her, and also it seems that managers of other stores are being killed off. In nonstop prose, Gunk Baby takes aim at orientalism and the Zen movement, violence, fashion, and middle-class boredom.'

Source: Publisher's catalogue.

'The brilliant new novel from Charlotte Wood, acclaimed author of The Natural Way of Things .

'People went on about death bringing friends together, but it wasn't true. The graveyard, the stony dirt - that's what it was like now. They knew each other better than their own siblings, but Sylvie's death had opened up strange caverns of distance between them.

'Four older women with a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three. Can they survive together without her?

'They are Jude, a once-famous restaurateur, Wendy, an acclaimed public intellectual, and Adele, a renowned actress now mostly out of work. Struggling to recall exactly why they've remained close all these years, the grieving women gather for Christmas at Sylvie's old beach house - not for festivities, but to clean the place out before it is sold.

'Without Sylvie to maintain the group's delicate equilibrium, frustrations build and painful memories press in. Fraying tempers, an elderly dog, unwelcome guests and too much wine collide in a storm that brings long-buried hurts to the surface - and threatens to sweep away their friendship for good.

'The Weekend explores growing old and growing up, and what happens when we're forced to uncover the lies we tell ourselves. Sharply observed and excruciatingly funny, this is a jewel of a book, a celebration of tenderness and friendship that is nothing short of a masterpiece.'  (Publication summary)

''If this was a dream, then he wanted to know when it would end. Maybe it would end if he went to see Lydia. But it was the one thing he was not allowed to do.'...

Arky Swann is a film composer in New York separated from his wife, who has made him promise to keep a terrible secret. One day he finds his way to The Atrium at MOMA and sees Marina Abramovic in her performance The Artist is Present. The performance continues for seventy-five days and, as it unfolds, so does Arky as he considers marriage, art and the nature of commitment and love over a long-term union. The Museum of Modern Love is the story of one of the world's greatest art events and a man in search of connection.' (Publication summary)

'She hears her own thick voice deep inside her ears when she says, 'I need to know where I am.' The man stands there, tall and narrow, hand still on the doorknob, surprised. He says, almost in sympathy, 'Oh, sweetie. You need to know what you are.'

'Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of a desert. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there with eight other girls, forced to wear strange uniforms, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious armed jailers and a 'nurse'. The girls all have something in common, but what is it? What crime has brought them here from the city? Who is the mysterious security company responsible for this desolate place with its brutal rules, its total isolation from the contemporary world? Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them: in each girl's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man. They pray for rescue - but when the food starts running out it becomes clear that the jailers have also become the jailed. The girls can only rescue themselves.

'The Natural Way of Things is a gripping, starkly imaginative exploration of contemporary misogyny and corporate control, and of what it means to hunt and be hunted. Most of all, it is the story of two friends, their sisterly love and courage.

'With extraordinary echoes of The Handmaid's Tale and Lord of the Flies, The Natural Way of Things is a compulsively readable, scarifying and deeply moving contemporary novel. It confirms Charlotte Wood's position as one of our most thoughtful, provocative and fearless truth-tellers, as she unflinchingly reveals us and our world to ourselves.' (Publication summary)

'Throwim Way Leg is unputdownable, a book of wonder and excitement, of struggle and sadness, a love letter to Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya.

'This book brims with marvellous stories. Tim Flannery meets skilled hunters and befriends a shaman. He climbs mountains never before scaled by Europeans, discovers new species and stumbles across the giant bones of extinct marsupials.

'And he writes movingly about the fate of indigenous people when their intricate cultures collide with mining companies and the high-tech world of the late twentieth century.

'‘In New Guinea Pidgin,’ Tim Flannery explains, ‘throwim way leg means to go on a journey. It describes the action of thrusting out your leg to take the first step of what can be a long march…’

'With these words he invites us to share in his breathtaking adventures in the jungles of Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya. You will never think about the bird-shaped island to our north in the same way again.'

'When he was no longer required by the Royal Navy, Admiral Watkiss entered Chilean service as their naval Commander-in-Chief. Captain Halfhyde had previously rescued Watkiss from his disillusioned superiors, but now a coup has returned the Admiral to favour and he is in command of the Chilean battleship ALMIRANTE SMITH, proceeding to Portsmouth to take part in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee fleet review. Halfhyde's almost impossible task - with the attendant risk of murder and mayhem - is to keep Watkiss safe and out of trouble during Her Majesty's presence at Spithead off the Isle of Wight.' (Publication summary)

'Night falls. In a lonely valley called the Sink, four people prepare for a quiet evening. Then in his orchard, Murray Jaccob sees a moving shadow. Across the swamp, his neighbour Ronnie watches her lover leave and feels her baby roll inside her. And on the verandah of the Stubbses’ house, a small dog is torn screaming from its leash by something unseen. Nothing will ever be the same again. ' (Publication summary)

'Tim Winton's first Miles Franklin-winner, Shallows revolves around the ruthless commerce of whaling, and Queenie Cookson, who joins the fight to end it.
'Whales have always been the life-force of Angelus, a small town on the south coast of Western Australia. Their annual passing defines the rhythms of a life where little changes, and the town depends on their carcasses. So when the battle begins on the beaches outside their town, and when Queenie Cookson, a local girl, joins the Greenies to make amends for the crimes of her whaling ancestors, it can only throw everything into chaos.' (Publication summary)