AustLit

'Adelaide. Summertime. 1985. Fourteen-year-old Frankie is struggling to make sense of her older sister Justine's admission to hospital with anorexia. But growing up is harder than it seems, and as the summer passes, Frankie has to try to make sense of her own life, too.

'Years later, looking back on her sister's illness from the perspective of adulthood, Frankie reflects on its effects on herself and Justine, and on how it shaped the women they became.

'A quiet, nuanced study of sisterhood and a portrait of the long-term effects of anorexia on a family, Ravenous Girls powerfully explores the chasms that lie between adolescence and adulthood, sickness and health, and intimacy and loneliness.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Two young women, brought up to expect conventional lives, are thrown together in unexpected circumstances. Each has suffered a devastating loss that challenges their belief in life and themselves. It’s rare to come across a work of deep psychological insight conveyed with such verve and lightness of touch.

'Kelly sweeps the reader into the lives and passions of her two central characters and into the bustling city streets of Sydney in the 1920s. A powerfully moving book that sparkles with vitality.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Kevin Brophy has worked as a carer for the aged and disabled, as a child psychologist, a roof tiler, cleaner, and a concrete labourer. After teaching developmental psychology for ten years at technical colleges, he lectured in creative writing for nearly twenty years at the University of Melbourne, where he is Emeritus Professor. As a writer he has chronicled the urban life of Melbourne, especially the street life of his heartland, Brunswick. He is a past winner of the Calibre Essay Prize, the Michel Wright Prize for poetry, and his fiction has been shortlisted for the Vogel Prize and the FAW Christina Stead award. He has been patron of the Melbourne Poets Union since 2004. In 2021 he was awarded an Order of Australia for services to creative writing. The Lion in Love is his second collection of short fiction.' (Publication summary)

'Although set a hundred years ago, John Clanchy's new novel powerfully captures the devastating and persistent reality of a fundamental flaw in the role of our major institutions. Central to In Whom We Trust is James Pearse, an essentially good but circumstantially weak man, who is forced to examine his role at the St Barnabas Home for Children, an orphanage that has betrayed the individuals entrusted to its care. He must face the devastating wider consequences of a life of moral equivocation.' (Publication summary)

'Call Me is Julian Davies’ seventh novel. Tangentially related to his previous social satire, Crow Mellow, this is a contemporary Australian story of thwarted young love, and an ambitious attempt to take us deep within the lives and experience of two perceptive yet conflicted teenagers in their last year of school. If love beset by complication is a familiar pattern in fiction, then, in this story, complication dances beguilingly between reality and absurdity.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Afterwards, she couldn’t remember actually making a decision to steal from him. It was as if it had already been made, a long time ago, and simply awaited the opportunity.

'She didn’t, of course, call it stealing. As she slid the fifty dollar note into the pocket of her own jeans, and dropped the shirt into the washing machine—carried on, in fact, as if nothing had happened—she told herself that someone had to take some responsibility.

'The role of silence in the relationships of the people who populate this richly varied collection of stories is mirrored in the restraint of the writing that captures them. While the characters have all the difficulties communicating that we can recognise in our own lives, Buckle’s deceptively understated style reveals them with startling cumulative power.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Hartmann Wallis, who has a wild and somewhat incestuous relationship with the well-known author and artist Robin Wallace-Crabbe, has a punchy new collection of poetry released by Finlay Lloyd on 13 August. Hartmann is something of an enigma, but Wallace-Crabbe has had many books published both here and overseas, including literary works, crime fiction novels (as Robert Wallace) and non-fiction essays. The book is richly illustrated by Phil Day, including two colour watercolours.' (Publication summary)

'This collection of prose poetry from Cassandra Atherton creates a naturally intimate world while, at the same time, fluidly examining complex connections between popular and high culture.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This long essay is an engagingly personal, playful and thoughtful examination of the arrival in 1832 in Tasmania of a shipload of women, sent to redress the imbalance of genders in that colonial settlement.' (Publication summary)

'This collection of linked essays from Timothy Morrell explores, with a deft ironic touch, our obsession with travel, in the process taking us to some places that perhaps only the author would want to visit.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This long lively essay from Phillip Stamatellis portrays the ‘biography’ of a café in Goulburn in the 1970s and 80s. We witness the café’s passing parade of motley customers through the eyes of the youngest son of the Greek immigrants who run it.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This wonderfully illustrated collection from Paul McDermott contains a haunting parable about a boy and a goat, and a series of poems that are both fiercely ironic and strangely moving.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Julian Davies’ sixth and most unusual novel, is a contemporary social satire closely based on Aldous Huxley’s first novel (from 1921), Crome Yellow. This playful response to another book is startlingly furthered by the text being surrounded by almost 400 drawings by Phil Day, whose hand-made books are collected by many state and university libraries, including The National Library of Australia. In this lively collaboration between words and pictures, the illustrations form a closely related parallel visual text that weave around and interact with the unfolding story. Set in multi-millionaire Mitchell Rimbush’s bush retreat, where artists and writers on the make gather with their wealthy admirers, conversation is the one constant prerequisite.' (Publication abstract)

'A collection of richly varied long stories by John Clanchy. These stories reveal the disguised impulses and motivations, the telling switch-points of modern life. With humour, insight and compassion, Clanchy draws us deep within the world of his characters.' (Publication summary)

'Nothing Ventured contains several comics. The drawing is fresh and the stories quiet yet enlivened by playfully dark humour. ' (Publication summary)

'NY takes its author to Manhattan where she has encounters that surprise and deeply affect her. ' (Publication summary)

'The Dark Days of Matty Lang is a powerful story of friendship, love and betrayal.' (Publication summary)

'Bruno Kramzer is an intriguing and disturbing story of evasion and betrayal. ' (Publication summary)