Cirrus@Austlit

'Catherine Cole’s new novel Sleep revolves around an extended family of women and the ways in which they manage intergenerational trauma. The protagonist, Ruth, struggles with issues of abandonment. She has to deal with the trauma of her mother, Monica, which had been passed down to Monica through her father, a survivor of the Second World War. He returned from the war a troubled and restless man, estranged from his family and the Yorkshire landscape of his childhood. He relocated the family from Yorkshire, where Monica had grown up, to London where they continued to move from house to house, with Monica and her sister always homesick for Yorkshire. Although they had never lived there, Monica’s daughter, Ruth, and her sister, Antoinette, remained deeply attached to the Yorkshire landscape of their mother’s childhood, and to the people who inhabited it, especially their Aunt Elsie.' (Introduction)

'It took me the first thirty pages of Bri Lee’s Eggshell Skull to connect the jittery judge’s associate described in its opening chapter with the self-possessed author I had seen moderating an event at Avid Reader in Brisbane’s West End last year. I hadn’t even realised that the author of the book was Australian. But while Google quickly confirmed this, it would have been difficult to get much further into Lee’s memoir without being struck by the locality of it and its author.' (Introduction)

'Tara June Winch’s hugely accomplished and intensely engaging narrative, The Yield, reaches deep into Australian culture and society in its ancient, colonial and modern aspects. The means deployed to assemble this fluid, three-dimensional model of a place and its people are ingenious and effective.' (Introduction)

'As the gruesome reality of World War One dawned on Australians in 1917, a woman from Queensland published a book of love poetry which became one of the nation’s bestsellers. It was considered distasteful in society for a woman to display passion or allude to sex. Yet Zora Cross, born in Brisbane in 1890 and a granddaughter of Queensland pioneer and landowner, Zachariah Skyring, was to create something of a sensation with the publication of Songs of Love and Life. With a cover illustration by Norman Lindsay, the publication was bordering on scandalous.' 

 (Introduction)

'It is a brave writer who tackles the subject of mental illness, sufferers of which still labour under the stigma of being “different”: most “ordinary” people fear and dread mental illness and find it hard to comprehend. But Stephanie Bishop, author of Man Out of Time, a novel in which the protagonist is clearly disturbed, is on record as stating that her father was plagued by depression for much of his life. Thus, she also runs the risk of readers taking her novel as a factual account, but it is definitely a work of the imagination, despite the parallels with Bishop’s life. In her second novel, the much-lauded The Other Side of the World, she also draws on her family background while constructing a gripping novel.' 

 (Introduction)

'The Bright and the Cold: Selected Poems of Anne Elder compiled by Catherine Elder and The Heart’s Ground: A Life of Anne Elder by Julia Hamer are companion books in their representation of the oeuvre and life of a poet whose literary career began in the mid-1950s and subsequently produced two collections: For the Record in 1972 and Crazy Woman and Other Poems, posthumously in 1976. Anne Elder’s name is well known, synonymous as it is with the prestigious annual award for the first book of poetry published in Australia, an award inaugurated by her husband John Elder following her death. While each of Elder’s individual books received a few critical reviews, her full oeuvre has had minimal critical attention. Her books have long been out of print and this in itself will have limited her readership. Catherine Elder writes in her “Preface” that the concurrent publication in 2018 of a biography and the Selected, marks two milestones: the 100th anniversary of her mother’s birth and the 40th year of the Anne Elder Poetry Award.' (Introduction)

'Australian author, Belinda Castles has written four books. Her first novel was Falling Woman (2000); the second, The River Baptists (2007) was the winner of the Australian Vogel Literary Award (2006) while her third novel is Hannah & Emil (2012). In 2018, she released her fourth book, Bluebottle. The title can be interpreted as denoting the setting at Bilgola Beach, relationships of character, and the sting of the plot.' (Introduction)