Cirrus@Austlit

'My Journey with the Nixons and Others is a bitter-sweet story set in Melbourne from the 1960s to the present, a story of growing up in the company of a bizarre family called the Nixons. Sad and humorous  in turns, it is told in an episodic fashion that never flags.'

'Journey to Find out What Happened concerns a scam perpetrated against the US army in post-war Paris.  The cast comprises a world-weary journalist, a shady lawyer, an enigmatic US soldier and a number of side characters.  Follow the journalist as he tries to find out what really happened. It’s a mystery in the best tradition of Graham Greene’s The Third Man.'  (Publication summary)

'Journeys of a Prodigal Son  is a romp set in the sixteenth century, travelling with the story’s insensitive protagonist on a journey through Renaissance Italy. He is shipwrecked and meets a Venetian merchant and his family, a duchessa, a Jewish librarian at the University of Bologna and a wise sophisticated Turk. Liberally laced with sexual adventures, the story takes us to exotic settings and unexpected endings.'  (Publication summary)

'Albert Trajstman has again shown his mastery of the novella form in this new collection of three new works. Diverse and ambitious, the stories take us to faraway places and strange situations. Each novella twists and turns in unexpected directions, changes shape and weaves strands together.' (Publication summary)

'Come on! Be daring and take a journey to faraway places. These are not the usual faraway places and these faraway places will leave you with more than just bragging rights. Faraway Places goes to dark and dingy places that the faint-hearted might wish are truly faraway. But are they? Not when you take a crazed trip with an odd-ball who dreams of a faraway place all the while he is on a slow-burn to insanity. Maybe he can solve the problem of living in a caravan alongside a garbage tip with a foul-mouthed significant other and a companion dog. That's not an easy problem to solve when you lack initiative. Perhaps the frozen wastelands of pre-revolutionary Russia are a change of location but still you'll find that it's that kind of faraway place where many bizarre things could be possible: dog-headed people might exist, a nasty conman can become a tsar and if you want to save your skin, there are people you should avoid. If that's not enough, then waiting to be solved is the provenance of two mysterious trunks and their contents in the basement of St Petersburg's Hermitage.
'Finally, a misconstruction about a killing on an isolated farm in a British colony in 1815 leads to disastrous consequences. Decent men can commit abominable acts and criminals can be decent. In this faraway place, it's brutal times all round-brutal times for the original native inhabitants, for settlers and their women, and for the convicts and child convicts. ' (Publication summary)