AustLit

'Seventeen-year-old Anna is running into the night. Fleeing her boyfriend, her mother, and everything she has known.

'She is travelling into the country, to the land and the grandparents she has never met, looking for answers to questions that have never been asked.

'For every family has secrets.

'But some secrets - once laid bare - can never be forgiven.

'A dark, deeply compelling, coming-of-age YA novel from the author of As Stars Fall.' (Publication summary)

'In October 2018, the hashtag MeToo went viral.

'Since then we've watched controversy erupt around Geoffrey Rush, Germaine Greer and Junot Díaz. We've talked about tracking the movement back via Helen Garner, Rosie Batty and Hannah Gadsby. We've discussed #NotAllMen, toxic masculinity and trolls. We've seen the #MeToo movement evolve and start to accuse itself - has it gone too far? Is it enough? What does it mean in this country?

'And still, women are not safe from daily, casual sexual harassment and violence.

'In this collection thirty-five contributors share their own #MeToo stories, analysis and commentary to survey the movement in an Australian context.

'This collection resists victimhood. It resists silence. It insists on change.'   (Publication summary)

'I’m a local now. That’s what they tell me, now that I have someone in the ground. I watched my husband, my father, my brother, and my uncle, brace their feet at the grassy edge of the hole as they lowered my mother’s shrouded body in, straps under her neck, her waist, her knees; a corpse in a snug muslin bag, strewn with roses: the human-animal shape of her clear. She wobbled until she hit bottom, until the clay had her. We sent more roses in after her. Scattered soil on the petals, slowly at first. And then we picked up spades and shovelled it in. And now the same curve of earth that holds my home, holds her. When I sit at my desk to write, she is under the same ground that is beneath my feet. When I lie down in my bed at night, there are no human others between me and her, just forest and grass and rock and sky.'  (Introduction)

'When are you having children?' 'Why didn't you have another child?' 'Well, I guess that's your choice, but...'

'They are questions asked of women all the time. Beneath them is the assumption that all women want to have children, and the judgement that if they don't, they'll be somehow incomplete. And that's only the beginning ... With parenthood taking centre stage in today's moral and consumer culture - and yummy-mummies and domestic goddesses the stars of the show - being a mother, or not being a mother, has never been so complicated. It seems the list of rights and wrongs gets longer daily, with guilt-ridden mothers everywhere struggling to keep on top of it all, and non-mothers struggling in a culture that defines women by their wombs. In this collection of fiction and non-fiction stories, Australia's best women writers reflect on motherhood. Their stories tackle everything from the decision not to have children to the so-called battle between working and stay-at-home mums. From infertility and IVF, to step-parenting and adoption, to miscarriage and breastfeeding, child meltdowns and marriage breakdowns, the stories explore and celebrate the full gamut of the motherhood experience, and give a much needed voice to those who won't ever be called 'Mum'.' (Publication summary)

'A bush fire, and its aftermath, links a Bush-Stone curlew and three teenagers experiencing loss, love and change.

'The fire was fast and hot ... only days after it went through, there were absolutely no birds left. I should have seen it as an omen, the birds all leaving like that.

'Robin is a self-confessed bird-nerd from the country, living in the city. On the first day at her new school, she meets Delia. Delia is freaky and definitely not good for Robin's image.

'Seth, Delia's brother, has given up school to prowl the city streets. He is angry at everything, especially the fire that killed his mother.

'When a rare and endangered bird turns up in the city parklands, the lives of Robin, Seth and Delia become fatefully and dangerously intertwined ...

'An intricate love story about nature, grief, friendship and life.

'Beautiful, poignant, with wonderfully original characters and a unique blend of time and place.' (Publication summary)

'Victorian writer Christie Nieman has wrought a quintessentially modern Australian fiction from the sentiment so eloquently expressed decades earlier in Aldo Leopold’s Round river that ‘one of the penalties of an ecological edcation is that one lives alone in a world of wounds’ (1993: 165). The human cost in a country where environmental care comes 200 years too late is measured in the small story of one rural woman’s efforts to redress the harm with her own personal, self-sacrificing, and ultimately futile, action. ' (Editor's abstract)