Cirrus@Austlit

'When Alan’s mother rings to beg him to return to the family home for the final weeks of his father’s life, he baulks, unwilling to be around the man who tried to control every moment of his childhood and adolescence. But he is at the sick man’s bedside when his father makes an extraordinary request. Alan is tempted but does he follow through?

'Smothered is the coming of age story of a socially isolated young man told with unsparing skill and sympathetic insight.

'Alan grows up in a baffling world of stifling normality. His father, Tosh, is an ambitious man of more energy than talent; his mother is a caring woman who accepts the necessity of being seen to respect a conventional life. As he struggles to find purpose and worth, Alan is drawn through a tangle of drugs, self-harm, and self-serving friendships, always unable to free himself from the quagmire of family life and expectation. His final confrontation with his father and his past is both terrifying and consoling.

'Smothered is a work of great understanding, told with skill, humour, and compassion.' (Publication summary)

'Macaulay Station is a lament and a celebration. Frank Munro has lost his close friend Charlie, dead just one year, his career is a mundane casualty of the technological revolution, his youth is a memory, another casualty of the tyranny of time.Frank Munro has had change thrust upon him. He’s trying to adapt.

'Once an award winning journalist, Frank has been put out to pasture, but he is fighting to renew his purpose, renew his life, and save the woman he loves from her disastrous infatuation.

'Can a conversation with a dead man on Macaulay Station point the way?

'A novel for anyone who has glimpsed the future and didn't like what they saw.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Graeme Sparkes’ father was deployed to Japan a few months after Hiroshima, aged just 18. A few months later, he had a psychotic episode and spent the next four months in a Japanese psychiatric hospital. This Australian memoir by Melbourne author, Graeme Sparkes, is in the same vein as ‘Angela’s Ashes’. It details the challenges of growing up in the 50s and 60s with a father who had severe mental illness and a gambling addiction. Growing up with a father who was responsible for two sieges, one of them 18 hours, and a second some twenty years later, when he convinced police he had petrol bombs in the house. Sparkes had to get a Freedom of Information order to access all of his late father’s medical records, which were held at Veteran Affairs. What followed was a journey of discovery, grief and compassion, as the story of his father’s mental illness, at a time when support groups and organisations did not exist.

'The book is also a way of explaining to his son why he was given away for adoption. The chaos in Sparkes’ life at the time his son was born meant he was unable to care for him. They have since formed a good relationship.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In 1996 Sparkes undertook a journey around his own country, travelling mainly on buses, staying in backpacker hostels, discovering a land that was every bit as exotic and unexpected as many places he had been to overseas. This is a beguiling story about the locals and overseas travellers he encountered along the way.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Graeme Sparkes and his partner Tania spent a year travelling north through Latin America. This enthralling account of their journey takes the reader through lush, rain-soaked jungles, across arid deserts, and into the chaotic life of the region's cities.

'Sparkes gives a frank, compelling and sometimes comic account of his and Tania's adventures. He has an eagle eye for irresistible detail: the majestic extremities of the landscape, the grubby hotels, the antiquity of the culture, the endemic poverty, and the extraordinary people Sparkes meets on the road.

'Beyond Tijuana is a sweeping evocation of Latin America, and an intimate glimpse into the experience of travel itself.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.