AustLit

'Set in both Prague and Melbourne, Call Me Marlowe captures a man’s search for his motherland in the hope of making sense of his life.

'With a delicate touch, the novel embodies the nature of trauma — both personal and political — in people’s lives. Harold Vaněk loves Marylou, a woman he met in South Korea, where she was working as a sex worker, but whom he has managed to bring to Melbourne. She is the one who calls Harold ‘Marlowe’. Theirs is an uncommonly beautiful but tenuous intimacy.

'Harold feels his mistakes are urging him to leave Melbourne. In a wild gamble to retrieve all he has lost, he disappears to Prague. What happens in ‘the City of a Hundred Spires’ is both remarkable and affecting. The people he meets there — Vacláv, Marie, Pete, and Petr — and the soul of the city itself provide answers and a ‘world’ that he desperately wants Marylou to be part of.' (Publication summary)

'From the moment French-born Alienor encountered a pair of wild horses in the Australian outback, she was transfixed. Fiercely loved by some and considered a scourge by others, brumbies have a complicated place in Australian culture and history. Inspired to celebrate their character, Alienor tamed three brumbies and teamed up with them to conquer Australia’s longest trek.

'Wild At Heart follows Alienor and her horses on a three-year journey stretching an extraordinary 5330 kilometres from Healesville in Victoria to Cooktown in tropical Far North Queensland. Through her travels across some of Australia’s most spectacular terrain, battling isolation and the elements, she built a profound bond with her horses and made life-changing discoveries where she least expected.

'Featuring stunning photography from world-renowned adventure photographer Cat Vinton, Wild at Heart is a quintessentially Australian story of breathtaking beauty and indomitable spirit.'

'After many years spent living in Seoul, a young man called Harold drifts back to Australia and rents a room above a fish and chip shop called The Sea & Us.  Who he meets and what he experiences there propels him to question his own yearnings and failings, and to fight for meaning and a sense of place that can only be reached by facing what is lost.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This is the story of two flawed eccentrics. Everything they do subverts their firm intention of keeping up appearances. They meet just after the war in liberated Paris but they cannot quite free themselves from the many strings attached to them - the old aunts, the sisters, the cousins, the nuns and the ominous concierges who dog their footsteps. Alexandre is a banker and a Resistant and lives in a world of numbers and Roman emperors. Poum resides in the Odyssey and in her bed, hiding from the mysterious disapproval of their relatives, for they both seem to persist in some irreparable faux pas which has them wading through a lifetime pickle. Their daughter, Catherine, would like to help but she seems to be part of the problem.

'This is no ordinary childhood, and Catherine de Saint Phalle's acceptance of her parents, despite their flaws, shines through, propelling us head first into their strange, yet beautiful, Parisian world.

'Poum and Alexandre is a searingly honest, humorous and moving elegy to family and place, and a meditation on the ways they ultimately define us.' (Publication summary)

'In the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, a female narrator, who remains unnamed is trying to come to terms with the absence of Jack, the man she loves. In a bar she meets Bernice, a radio personality, in her late thirties and flirting with IVF. Finding a job as a gardener, she discovers that her co-worker, Mitali, has an unresolved mourning that attracts other deaths into its orbit. Later on, she befriends the resolutely mysterious bar owner, Sarah, and her daughter, Mary, who has, for potent (and as yet unrevealed) reasons, converted to Islam and donned a burqa.

'The lives of these women are characterised by love and loss, and are woven together by their shared grieving at the senseless murder of Jill Meagher.

'On Brunswick Ground traverses the world of longing, grief and personal loss with an assured and literary touch. It is a novel that is also heart-warming, and affirming. Catherine de Saint Phalle truly understands the surprising ways in which tragedy and loss can tighten the bonds of friendship and of a community.' (Publication summary)