Cirrus@Austlit

'From famine to freedom, how a young boy fled Chairman Mao's China to a new life in Australia

'Andrew Kwong was only eight when he witnessed his first execution. The desperate scene left him sleepless, anxious and doubtful about his fervour as a revolutionary in Mao's new China. Yet he knew if he devoted himself to the Party and its Chairman he would be saved. That's what his teacher told him.

'Months later, it was his own father on trial. This time the sentence was banishment to a re-education camp, not death. Yet it left the family tainted, despised, and with few means of survival during the terrible years of persecution and famine known as the Great Leap Forward. Escape seemed the only solution, and it would be twelve-year-old Andrew who undertook the perilous journey first.

'This is the poignant, resonant story of a young boy's awakening - to survival, education, fulfilment, and eventually to a new life of freedom in Australia.' (Publication summary)

'Hearing Maud: A Journey for a Voice is a work of creative non-fiction that details the author’s experiences of deafness after losing most of her hearing at age four. It charts how, as she grew up, she was estranged from people and turned to reading and writing for solace, eventually establishing a career as a writer.

'Central to her narrative is the story of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century Queensland expatriate novelist Rosa Praed. Although Maud was deaf from infancy, she was educated at a school which taught her to speak rather than sign, a mode difficult for someone with little hearing. The breakup of Maud’s family destabilised her mental health and at age twenty-eight she was admitted to an asylum, where she stayed until she died almost forty years later. It was through uncovering Maud’s story that the author began to understand her own experiences of deafness and how they contributed to her emotional landscape, relationships and career.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In the tradition of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, a funny, dark, and tender coming-of-age memoir about life as a perpetual fish-out-of-water, from the Yugoslavian-born comedic storyteller, MothStorySLAM favorite, and host of the Women of Letters literary salon.

'Sofija Stefanovic makes the first of many awkward entrances in 1982, born in Yugoslavia just as her communist country begins to crumble. The circumstances of her birth (a blackout, gasoline shortages, bickering parents) don't exactly get her off to a running start. While around her ethnic tensions are being stoked by hotheaded totalitarian leaders with violent agendas, Sofija's early years are filled with rock music, inadvisable crushes, micro-miniskirts whose Serbian name means "to the pussy," and enough insecurity to sink a Croatian submarine.

'In 1988 her parents finally decide to flee to Australia, where Sofija ditches ESL class, experiments with bad hairstyles, and makes out with her bedroom mirror for practice. As conflicts escalate back home, her parents are glued to the nightly news, anxious for loved ones, homesick, clinging to their insular community. While her father toils at work and her eloquent mother is relegated to the bungled speech of a foreigner, Sofija is eager to find acceptance among her friends, going to hilarious lengths to hide her morbid, unassimilated family.

'But everything comes to a screeching halt with the sudden illness of her father, unseating concerns about assimilation and the situation back home, rupturing Sofija's universe as she prepares to embark out on her own for the first time.

'In Miss Ex-Yugoslavia, Sofija offers us a window inside a beleaguered culture that she both cherishes and resents, capturing the experience of not quite connecting with your old country, and yet never quite being embraced by your new one. Both refreshingly candid and wonderfully vulnerable, Miss Ex-Yugoslavia will stay with you for a long time.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.