Cirrus@Austlit

'In her latest book, Miles Franklin winner Anna Funder rescues George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, from the shadows of incuriosity. By Michael Williams.' 

'Home and displacement sit side by side in Chinese Fish. Inhabiting multiple perspectives, Grace Yee’s polyphonic verse novel follows a family suspended between two cultures over two decades, from their resettlement in New Zealand from Hong Kong in the 1960s through to grief and loss.' (Introduction)   

'The Irish writer and wit Oscar Wilde said we can be in the gutter but look to the stars. The Melbourne-based writer and humorist Robert Skinner agrees on the location but what he sees is the gutter. “Say what you want about rock bottom,” he writes in his whimsical, insouciant memoir I’d Rather Not, “but at least it’s sturdy.”' (Introduction)   

'Dementia has been in the spotlight in recent times, largely because an ageing population has made the disease unignorable. Indeed, we have seen the labelling of a new generation – the “sandwich generation” – to recognise a cohort of middle-aged people caught between caring for their growing children and their ageing parents. Cynthia Dearborn’s The Year My Family Unravelled is a personal account of the challenges of caregiving for the elderly, though in Dearborn’s case she finds herself sandwiched between two countries, Australia and the United States, and two phases of her life, the functional one of her present and the dysfunctional one of her childhood.' (Introduction)