Cirrus@Austlit

'A cruel Emperor. An innocent brother, exiled to the sixth level of hell. A beautiful woman, imprisoned in a labyrinth beneath the palace. These are the players in a tale in which a series of ever-more-ingenious escapes are hatched; a chess-playing automaton is forged; an assassination or three attempted; and where every single book in the known Empire is destroyed - then re-created, page by page and book by book - all in the name of love and art.

'Meanwhile, in modern-day Australia: Xiang, a young Chinese-Australian man, is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate when HR discovers he doesn’t even speak a word of Chinese, and has been relying on Google Translate to do all his work. A doctor’s diagnosis reveals that he suffers from Taikophobia (fear of Chinese people) and, later, Anglophobia (fear of Westerners). Despite these impediments, he soon finds himself in China, in one of the country’s infamous ‘ghost cities’, those modern-day labyrinths built by the Chinese government to maintain an aggressive GDP. The once-empty ghost city of Port Man Tou has now been turned into a gigantic film set ...' (Publication summary)

'It sounded like a good idea at the time: A Hollywood spy thriller, starring, for the first time in history, an Asian male lead. With an estimated $350 million production budget and up-and-coming Hong Kong actor JK Jr, who, let’s be honest, is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but probably the hottest, Brood Empire was basically a sure thing. Until it wasn’t.

'So how did it all fall apart? There were smart guys involved. So smart, so woke. So woke it hurts. There was top-notch talent across the board and the financial backing of a heavyweight Chinese studio. And yet, Brood Empire is remembered now not as a historical landmark of Asian representation that smashed the bamboo ceiling in Hollywood, but rather as a fiasco of seismic proportions.

'The Whitewash is the definitive oral history of the whole sordid mess. Unofficial. Unasked for. Only intermittently fact-checked, and featuring a fool’s gallery of actors, producers, directors, film historians and scummy click-bait journalists, to answer the question of how it all went so horribly, horribly wrong.'  (Publication summary)

'Subhi's imagination is as big as the ocean and wise as the sky, but his world is much smaller: he's spent his whole life in an immigration detention centre. The Bone Sparrow is a powerful, heartbreaking, sometimes funny and ultimately uplifting hymn to freedom and love.

'Sometimes, at night, the dirt outside turns into a beautiful ocean. As red as the sun and as deep as the sky. I lie in my bed, Queeny's feet pushing up against my cheek, and listen to the waves lapping at the tent.

'Subhi is a refugee. Born in an Australian permanent detention centre after his mother fled the violence of a distant homeland, life behind the fences is all he has ever known. But as he grows, his imagination gets bigger too, until it is bursting at the limits of his world. The Night Sea brings him gifts, the faraway whales sing to him, and the birds tell their stories.

'The most vivid story of all, however, is the one that arrives one night in the form of Jimmie, a scruffy, impatient girl who appears from the other side of the wires, and brings a notebook written by the mother she lost. Unable to read it, she relies on Subhi to unravel her own family's love songs and tragedies.

'Subhi and Jimmie might both find a way to freedom, as their tales unfold. But not until each of them has been braver than ever before.' (Publication summary)