Cirrus@Austlit

'On the plane, taciturn miners spread out in jeans and high-vis vests. Large, grim men flying in to work underground, a dull uniformity in their baseball caps, workboots and doubtful manners. But as the plane banks across red earth and scrub and the tall chimneys of Mount Isa come into view, there is an apparition among these working men. With a stiff white quiff, flaming red lips, jangling chunky jewellery, a long dress of rainbow colours and pale skin swathed in silk scarves, Katie Noonan would be a flamboyant presence anywhere. ' (Introduction)

'The morning after receiving the Vogel Literary Award, Marija Peričić sits in the A-One Cafe at the ABC Centre in Ultimo. Filled with people and lively conversations, the cafe is in rush hour. At one end a large television broadcasts the morning news, at the other end a film crew is setting up  lights and cameras. Peričić has just finished a radio interview with Fran Kelly on RN Breakfast, telling the audience in a soft, even voice, that her book, The Lost Pages, is a story about the rivalry between two men, in literature and in love. Writing a novel was her life’s dream, she said, something she had always wanted to do. ' (Introduction)

'Some of the most exciting, tonally ambitious and uncompromising fiction that has been published in Australia in recent years has come from Aboriginal authors – most notably, the remarkable Waanyi writer Alexis Wright and the extraordinary Noongar writer Kim Scott. A new novel from the multi-award-winning Scott is something to take seriously. '  (Introduction)

'Eric Blair died for want of a typist. Self-exiled to a remote Scottish island and hollowed out by tuberculosis, he quailed at the prospect of typing a clean manuscript copy of his just-completed novel. Despite an SOS to his publishers, no typist eventuated. If he were to meet his end-of-1948 deadline, he’d have to do the job himself. And so he did, propped up in bed with the typewriter on a tea tray. But three days after typing “THE END”, Blair suffered his final collapse.' (Introduction)

'In My Lovely Frankie, the acclaimed YA writer Judith Clarke’s latest novel, Tom Rowland is 16 years old in the 1950s when he has a religious epiphany of sorts. He’s so struck that he defies the wishes of his loving but not terribly observant parents and enrols at St Finbar’s, a seminary on the coast. It’s hellish. Tom is lonely and homesick until he meets the boy in the cell next door, Frankie Maguire, who has been forced to the seminary after his fundamentalist parents catch him having sex (through no fault of his own). Tom falls for the tortured Frankie, causing a swirl of emotions around his relationship with God and Catholicism, his sexuality and his future as a priest.' (Introduction)