Cirrus@Austlit

'‘You know what my favourite word is?’’ the Clown asks. His daughter, Freckles, who is blind, does not answer, so he does. “Smile.” It is close to the most sinister use of smile, the word and the action, I have seen on screen.' (Introduction)

'‘Come to the woods,” wrote the Scottish-American conservationist John Muir, “for here is rest.” Muir’s tenacity as an ­explorer and gifts as a writer galvanised the national park movement in the US. Teddy Roosevelt, who loved killing things as much as preserving them, was convinced by Muir that wild places needed to be kept for ­future generations.' (Introduction)

'Australian crime fiction has a venerable tradition. Fergus Hume’s best-selling Melbourne murder novel, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, was published a year before the first of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories appeared in print. The appeal of those gaslight metropolitan mysteries has never wavered.' (Introduction)

'World War I produced an astonishing collection of diaries, poems and novels written by soldiers. One of the reasons for this was that most of the them were not professional servicemen. They disobeyed their superiors by keeping diaries, and if they hadn’t written what they did we would have only the official accounts.'  (Introduction)

'In Exploded View, Carrie Tiffany sheds the ­bucolic settings of her two previous novels for Australian suburbia. Her narrator is an ­unnamed teenager who lives with her mother and brother in their new home with their mum’s new partner, “father man”.'  (Introduction)

'If you don’t read your stars, maybe you should. There are all kinds of forces at work in the universe. Astral configurations are ‘‘mapped on to’’ your soul at birth, or so we are told in Minnie Darke’s novel Star Crossed.' (Introduction)