Cirrus@Austlit

'How strange it is the way the idyll of life in a Tuscan village can animate a literary mind with tall tales and true of a past that is partly gritty realism and partly a dreamt-up extravaganza of the panorama of life on the Italian land, where every beast is a creature of poignancy as well as poetry, but everything lilts like a fairytale even if the smell of the earth is rich with the reek of manure.' (Introduction)

'The author of this first novel is a young playwright from Brisbane by way of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The narrator, Isa Alaki, is a young prize-fighter who’s ended up in Brisbane by way of the same place, but there the biographies diverge.' (Introduction)

'Thirty-year-old Melburnian Kimberly Leamy leads a quiet life. She lives alone in a Coburg apartment and drives to a local TAFE at night where she teaches photography. One rainy evening between classes, Kim is approached by James Finn, a stranger who tells her he is certain she’s connected with the disappearance of toddler Sammy Went, who vanished from a small town in the United States 28 years earlier. Specifically, he believes that Kimberly is Sammy, the little sister he has spent his adult life searching for. (Introduction)