Cirrus@Austlit

'What happens when who you are is different to who you imagined you’d be? 

'When her son was three, Brooke Boland was diagnosed with depression. She went back to find where it all started – the panic attacks, the dissociation – in the early days of motherhood. When she found it difficult to read or write. In this wide-ranging collection of essays Boland moves on from the person she was and writes to understand who she is now. She swims with sharks, falls in love with a rabbit, and watches her father fight for his life. She is a newcomer in a small regional town and a mother, but what else? She writes about family and friends, life and mortality, memory and forgetting, and along the way she finds her voice again. This book is for anyone who has felt unmoored. It is about the unremarkable in-between, the way we try to build a home from nothing, the dirty dishes and the loads of washing. The uncertainty and the love. But written in sparkling prose with a sly and wry tone that is illuminating about the everyday as it pitches for a rich and fulfilled life.' (Publication summary)

'Weather, beasts and death. That’s what Hannah’s mother writes of in the letters she sends. They arrive in London from Australia and Hannah ignores them for as long as she can. “Every time a letter from her arrives, I lose my breath, as though some tiny venomous bug might spring from it. [The letter] has sat unopened since I brought it upstairs, stuffed into the cupboard next to the fuse box where I don’t have to look at it. But I feel it like a heat from the corner of the room.”' (Introduction)

'In Home Work: Essays on Love & Housekeeping, Helen Hayward writes thoughtfully about the value we give to housekeeping and the domestic side of our lives. She explores the art of running a home and, in the context of her own life, asks where our sense of worth comes from.' (Publication summary)

'Award-winning novelist and essayist Gregory Day has written widely on subjects as varied as the powerful owl and Australian poetry. Many of his nonfiction essays have appeared in notable literary publications over the years, each demonstrating Day’s eye for detail and ability to fold the metaphysical resonances of landscape within personal histories.' (Introduction)

'Antigone Kefala, 86, is both a poet and prose writer. She was born in Romania and relocated to Australia in 1959 after living in Greece and New Zealand. Late Journals is the final in a trilogy that began with Summer Visit (2003), followed by Sydney Journals (2008), all three published by Giramondo Publishing.'

'Terri-ann White’s long career has been marked by a certain wildness, but her latest project – starting a new publishing house in the midst of a pandemic – is probably the boldest. By Brooke Boland.' (Introduction)

'It’s over a year ago now that I watched from my parent’s garden as the sky turned a deeper, dirtier red. The birds were gone, replaced by camps of bats silhouetted black as they circled above us, confused and disorientated. The next morning, we saw Lake Conjola devastated on the news. My cousins cut our New Year celebrations short, quickly packed their things, and left. The highway clogged with escaping tourists.' (Introduction)

'Written by women from Indigenous, migrant and refugee backgrounds, Sweatshop Women: Volume Two runs parallel to a shift we’re currently experiencing in Australia’s literary culture.'

'The nuanced understanding and subtlety of Paramaditha's short stories, which cleverly navigates the intersection of contemporary setting and folklore, is masterful.'

'Black Inc's latest anthology is a wonderful selection of short stories by Australian women.'

'Memoirs, essays and fiction in this collection consider diaspora and migrant experience in a newly-defined Asia.'