AustLit

'Is it possible to write about the living without thinking of them as already dead?

'Michael Shamanov is a man running away from life’s responsibilities. His marriage is over, he barely sees his son and he hasn’t seen his mother since banishing her to a nursing home two years earlier. A successful screen writer, Michael’s encounter with his mother’s nurse leads him to discover that the greatest story he’s never heard may lie with his dying mother. And perhaps it’s her life he’s been running away from and not his own. Is the past ever finished? Should we respect another’s silence? And if so, is it ever possible to understand and put to rest the strange idea of family that travels through the flesh?

'From the Miles Franklin shortlisted author of No One comes a haunting gem of family secrets and impossible decisions.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In the ghost hours of a Monday morning a man feels a dull thud against the side of his car near the entrance to Redfern Station. He doesn’t stop immediately. By the time he returns to the scene, the road is empty, but there is a dent in the car, high up on the passenger door, and what looks like blood. Only a man could have made such a dent, he thinks. For some reason he looks up, though he knows no one is there. Has he hit someone, and if so, where is the victim?

'So begins a story that takes us to the heart of contemporary Australia’s festering relationship to its indigenous past. A story about guilt for acts which precede us, crimes we are not sure we have committed, crimes gone on so long they now seem criminal-less.

'Part crime novel, part road movie, part love story, No One takes its protagonist to the very heart of a nation where non-existence is the true existence, where crimes cannot be resolved and guilt cannot be redeemed, and no one knows what to do with ghosts that are real.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The scene you come across is not unusual in its brutality, but you vomit all the same. You stare down at what you have not digested as if it is the most miraculous thing. As if at this moment you would be happy if there was no other thing. And yet, even in this turning away, traces of what you cannot unsee linger like the perfume of mausoleum flowers...' (Publication abstract)

' ‘Just because you can’t see the chains doesn’t mean they don’t exist.’

'In the Sanctuary, two robed men cut the hair of clients who have been called to pass through the White or Black Door. Along with their hair, the clients shed stories: of the horrors of their past, the Place they’ve inhabited since their escape, and what lies beyond the Doors. These stories are inscribed as Legends, but do they record a vision of Paradise or Hell?

'This allegory, echoing Kafka, illuminates the stark terror of the modern age, marked by a border in constant shift between gods and men, truth and deception, freedom and constraint, memory and forgetting, revealing a world whose essence is its hiddenness - a world that hides, not in darkness, but in the light.

'‘What I will tell you now is only guesswork. Because when a person is called they just disappear and are never seen again. We assume that their case is finally being heard, that they have moved on from here to the next stage. You seem to think of it as something dreadful, but it’s why we came here after all. We came here of our own free will, you must remember that, and we are free to leave at any time.’' (Publication summary)

'Fourteen mesmerising fables and the etchings they inspired draw us back to our origins in a garden of sorrow and exile, death and renewal, beauty and melancholy.

'John Hughes re-imagines a series of fables in which Australian animals take on human qualities, as thief and actor, warrior and poet, farmer and merchant. These are reverse fables — in the way that the Antipodes reverse northern hemisphere logic — that cast us back to the flux at the beginning of the world; inchoate nature, the world in a state of formation, the garden and the inferno. These are New World stories.

'Accompanied by artist Marco Luccio’s darkly wry etchings, this collaboration between two artists is as unique as the stories it contains.' (Publisher's blurb)

'The Remnants is an intricate and deeply philosophical novel about translation between languages, cultures and, ultimately, the translation of the father into the son.

'A manuscript written by an Australian art historian is discovered by his son. Claiming to have found a series of lost paintings by Piero della Francesca in Arezzo, the father's manuscript moves between Renaissance Italy and post-Revolutionary Russia.

'At its core is the relationship the father has with an ageing Russian émigrée who, haunted by the ghost of her murdered son, claims to have nursed the poet Osip Mandelstam in his final days. The remnants of the father's manuscripts, notebooks and diaries are brought together through the son's commentary.' (From the publisher's website.)