Cirrus@Austlit

'As a young teen, if he likes a girl, Warwick Thornton grunts and groans and throws rocks at her. For him, Alice Springs is full of angels and demons. He is a lost kid on its streets, “drinking, smoking, thieving and fighting”, but he will find his voice as a DJ on the local Indigenous radio station, playing songs requested by prison inmates, fuelling empowerment as a priority in his later art.' (Introduction)

'If it’s possible to write richly about a very bleak place, Jeremy Chambers has done it in this book about the Australian suburb, a place “not really known for anything: people lived here, but that was all”. Suburbia, Chambers’ second novel after the much-praised The Vintage and the Gleaning, adds another voice to a welcome wave of Australian fiction that re-evaluates family life at the end of the 20th century, a time just close enough to make readers feel rather uncomfortable without quite causing us to look away.' (Introduction)