AustLit

'‘Welcome to the escape room. Your goal is simple. Get out alive.’

'In the lucrative world of Wall Street finance, Vincent, Jules, Sylvie and Sam are the ultimate high-flyers. Ruthlessly ambitious, they make billion-dollar deals and live lives of outrageous luxury. Getting rich is all that matters, and they'll do anything to get ahead.

'When the four of them become trapped in an elevator escape room, things start to go horribly wrong. They have to put aside their fierce office rivalries and work together to solve the clues that will release them. But in the confines of the elevator the dark secrets of their team are laid bare. They are made to answer for profiting from a workplace where deception, intimidation and sexual harassment thrive.

'Tempers fray and the escape room’s clues turn more and more ominous, leaving the four of them dangling on the precipice of disaster. If they want to survive, they’ll have to solve one final puzzle: which one of them is a killer?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Nová pozorování vombatů v Austrálii vedla k zajímavým vědeckým objevům. Například způsob, jakým se vombat vyrovnává s krajní situací a svým nepřítelem, vedl autorku Evu Papouškovou k  napsání druhého vombatího příběhu – tentokrát o nebezpečí. A to si pište, že má dobrý konec. Liška Vilhelmína, která plánovala sežrat celou vombatí rodinku, neslavně ostrouhá způsobem, jakým se to ve skutečnosti děje i v moudré přírodě.'

Source: Mladá fronta.

'George the Wombat journeys outside of his burrow and into a dark forest, where he meets a wily and cunning fox. The fox likes the look of George for dinner and George is so scared he can’t move! Can George get the courage to show the fox his brave side and get away from danger using a tactic only a wombat would know?'

Source: Graffeg.

'A heart-stopping novel of deception and delusion from an exciting new Australian author of domestic noir.

'When a body is found buried near the desolate forest road of Kellers Way, Detective Melanie Carter must identify the victim if she is to have any chance of finding the killer. That's no easy task with fragmentary evidence from a crime committed years earlier and a conspiracy of silence from anyone who might have information.

'The one person who may be able to help is Julie West. In a troubled marriage, Julie often jogs along Kellers Way to clear her mind and escape the confines of her suffocating suburban life. Until one day, something happens there that shakes Julie to the core, making her question everything she ever believed about her life, her marriage and even her sanity . . . ' (Publication summary)

'Zoe, a sometime artist, is from California. Martin, an engineer, is from Yorkshire. Both have ended up in picturesque Cluny, in central France. Both are struggling to come to terms with their recent past—for Zoe, the death of her husband; for Martin, a messy divorce.

'Looking to make a new start, each sets out alone to walk two thousand kilometres from Cluny to Santiago, in northwestern Spain, in the footsteps of pilgrims who have walked the Camino—the Way—for centuries. The Camino changes you, it’s said. It’s a chance to find a new version of yourself.

'But can these two very different people find each other?

'In this smart, funny and romantic journey, Martin’s and Zoe’s stories are told in alternating chapters by husband-and-wife team Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist.

'Two Steps Forward is a novel about renewal—physical, psychological and spiritual. It’s about the challenge of walking a long distance and of working out where you are going. And it’s about what you decide to keep, what you choose to leave behind and what you rediscover.' (Synopsis)

'A novel about love, music and coming to terms with the past, from the author of the international bestseller The Rosie Project.

'On the cusp of fifty, Adam Sharp has a loyal partner, earns a good income as an IT contractor and is the music-trivia expert at quiz nights. It’s the lifestyle he wanted, but something’s missing.

'Two decades ago, on the other side of the world, his part-time piano playing led him into a passionate relationship with Angelina Brown, who’d abandoned law studies to pursue her acting dream. She gave Adam a chance to make it something more than an affair—but he didn’t take it. And now he can’t shake off his nostalgia for what might have been.

'Then, out of nowhere, Angelina gets in touch. What does she want? Does Adam dare to live dangerously? How far will he go for a second chance?' (Publication summary)

'It is night, and two boys are crossing a river that is also a border. They have nothing but the clothes on their backs, their inheritance stitched into the lining of a belt, and the courage of an enormous gamble: that Europe will offer them a future they can no longer wait for in Afghanistan.

Travelling by truck, by boat, by train, by bus and on foot, Aryan and his younger brother Kabir have embarked on an epic journey, clinging to an itinerary they repeat like a mantra so as not to lose their way: Kabul Tehran Istanbul Athens Rome Paris London. There are moments of wonder and adventure but also battles against cold, heat, hunger, violence and exhaustion. Whether they are harvesting half-frozen oranges in Greece, or hiding behind a false wall on a truck to Italy, or sleeping under the rafters of a sawmill in France, the brothers are exploited for their labour, hustled for their money and ignored by almost everyone, except the police.

Hinterland is a novel about two children in the aftermath of trauma; underage, homeless and invisible in a foreign land. It shows what happens when the adult world rushes in, and what our universe looks like from the other side of the glass, to those displaced children who are out there, even now, on the road. Source: Allen & Unwin (Sighted 17/02/2012).

'Vombat je zvláštní zvířátko, které žije na druhé straně zeměkoule, až v daleké Austrálii. Hrozně rádo spí a taky hrozně rádo hrabe díry. I malý vombatí kluk Jirka je rád hrabe jako jeho tatínek. Jenomže i malí vombati musí chodit na nočník. A tak maminka rozhodne – nejdřív nočník, pak hrabání. Jirka sedí a sedí, ale na nočníku se mu nedaří. Chodí kolem něj kamarádi a udílejí mu všemožné přátelské rady, co dělat, aby se dařilo. Klokan radí skákat, husa zase hodně pít… Dopadne to samozřejmě kýženým, i když trochu překvapivým, výsledkem – koneckonců tato nesmírně vtipná a krásně ilustrovaná kniha pomůže těm nejmenším dětem a jejich rodičům, aby to na nočníku vždycky dobře dopadlo.'

Source: Mladá fronta.

'A tender, humorous picture book helping to introduce potty training to young children through the character of George the Wombat. George wants to play, but Mummy Wombat tells him he has to use the potty before he leaves. George is finding it very difficult until he gets some advice from his friends and Papa Wombat and he is finally successful!'

Source: Graffeg.

'A heart-warming debut about finding out what love and life is all about.

'At seven years old, Millie Bird realises that everything is dying around her. She wasn't to know that after she had recorded twenty-seven assorted creatures in her Book of Dead Things her dad would be a Dead Thing, too.

'Agatha Pantha is eighty-two and has not left her house since her husband died. She sits behind her front window, hidden by the curtains and ivy, and shouts at passers-by, roaring her anger at complete strangers. Until the day Agatha spies a young girl across the street.

'Karl the Touch Typist is eighty-seven when his son kisses him on the cheek before leaving him at the nursing home. As he watches his son leave, Karl has a moment of clarity. He escapes the home and takes off in search of something different.

'Three lost people needing to be found. But they don't know it yet. Millie, Agatha and Karl are about to break the rules and discover what living is all about.' (Publication summary)

'Peta Wheeler measures time differently now.

'Before the couch. After the couch. Before the couch, Peta knew who she was. A 34-year-old information-dissemination professional, married to the man of her dreams and thinking about motherhood. She'd never been late for work, drunk beer or kissed a stranger.

'After the couch, Peta hits a cyclist, tries to get pregnant, tries to make sure she isn't pregnant, avoids her husband and family and friends and colleagues, drinks too much coffee, and falls in love with a girl.

'And that's just the first week.' (From the publisher's website.)

'There are precious few places still untouched by tourism. Paradise Lost? Chance would be a fine thing. More like Paradise Packaged, Marketed and Sold in Easy-to-Enjoy Portions. And if there's money to be made shining light into the darkest corners of the world, SmallWorld wrote the book on it.

'Robert Rind is a legend in travel writing circles, fiercely independent and resolutely old school. Too old school. The Company decides he's a liability and sends young, pliable Mithra to tropical Maganda to take his place. But the guidebook writer's life isn't all bustling street markets and five-star resorts: as any seasoned traveller knows, things rarely go as planned and Robert Rind is unlikely to come quietly.

'Mic Looby's masterful debut novel weaves a hilarious and hair-raising tale of compromised idealism and corporate skullduggery. You'll never open another guidebook without reading between the lines.' (From publisher's blurb.)

Madness, cruelty and sexuality permeate the house where she grew up, but Lilian's sights are set on education, love and - finally - her own transcendent forms of independence. Lilian Singer, who starts life at the beginning of the twentieth century as the daughter of a prosperous middle-class Australian family and ends it as a cheerfully eccentric bag-lady living on the streets, quoting Shakespeare for a living.

'In the mid-1840s, a thirteen-year-old boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by Aborigines. Sixteen years later, when settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans, men and women who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place, hopeful and yet terrified of what it might do to them.

Given shelter by the McIvors, the family of the children who originally made contact with him, Gemmy seems at first to be guaranteed a secure role in the settlement, but there are currents of fear and mistrust in the air. To everyone he meets - from George Abbot, the romantically aspiring young teacher, to Mr Frazer, the minister, whose days are spent with Gemmy recording the local flora; from Janet McIvor, just coming to adulthood and discovering new versions of the world, to the eccentric Governor of Queensland himself - Gemmy stands as a different kind of challenge, as a force which both fascinates and repels. And Gemmy himself finds his own whiteness as unsettling in this new world as the knowledge he brings with him of the savage, the Aboriginal.' - Publisher's blurb (Chatto & Windus, 1993).

'In prose that is both elegant and lyrical, David Malouf departs from the little-known facts of Ovid's exile beyond the pale of civilization to create a deeply moving novel of extraordinary beauty. An outcast in a vast wasteland at the edge of the Black Sea, Ovid discovers a feral child. As he teaches the boy to speak the language of the civilized world, the child tutors him in his own tongue, the language of nature, and the once barren landscape begins to resonate with meaning.' (Publisher's blurb)

The Thorn Birds is the unforgettable story of the Clearys, spanning three generations; a sweeping family saga of dreams, titanic struggles, dark passions, and forbidden love in the Australian Outback. (Source: Trove)

Czechoslovakia's Ikarie science fiction magazine followed on from several fanzine/semi-samizdat science fiction almanacs published in the country in the late 1980s. These were titled Ikarie XB-1 through to Ikarie XB-4, with changes apparently being the publisher's attempt to circumvent restrictions on periodical press put in place by the country's ruling regime. However, according to the magazine's publishers the name was originally chosen in honour of the country's classic science fiction film, Ikarie XB-1 (ctd. Sandford).

First published in 1990, Ikarie went on to become one of the most important science fiction magazines in Europe. Published monthly with full-colour covers and black and white interiors, the magazine contained between five or six stories in each issue in addition to reviews and nonfiction articles. Over the years Ikarie published countless Czech authors along with translated stories from some of the best known contemporary science fiction writers from around the world.

After 20 years of publishing and 247 issues, Ikarie closed down after the publication of its November 2010 issue. According to one of the editors, Martin Susta, the magazine's unexpected demise was not due to poor sales but instead the publisher's desire to focus on lifestyle magazines (ctd. Sandford). Sust and other members have since started a new Czech SF magazine, named XB-1 (a reference to the second part of the Ikarie XB-1 film title). The new magazine comprises the same editorial board as Ikarie.