Cirrus@Austlit

'When you travel across the ocean on a boat, all your memories are washed away and you start a completely new life. That is how it is. There is no before. There is no history. The boat docks at the harbour and we climb down the gangplank and we are plunged into the here and now. Time begins.'

'David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simón and Inés take care of him in their new country. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog Bolívar to watch over him. But he’ll be seven soon. He should be at school. And so David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance in Estrella. It’s here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. But it’s here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what grown-ups are capable of.'

'The Schooldays of Jesus, the startling sequel to J. M. Coetzee’s widely praised The Childhood of Jesus, will beguile its readers. With the mysterious simplicity of a fable, it tells a story that raises the most direct questions about life itself.' (Source: Text Publishing website)

'"Bunyah has been my refuge and home place all my life. This book concentrates on the smallest habitats of community, the scattered village and the lone house, where space makes the isolated dwelling into an illusory distant city ruled by its family and their laws."

'On Bunyah tells a story of rural Australia in verse and photographs. From blood and fenceposts to broad beans and milk lorries, Les Murray evokes the life and landscape of his part of the country.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Black Rock White City is a novel about the damages of war, the limits of choice, and the hope of love. During a hot Melbourne summer Jovan's cleaning work at a bayside hospital is disrupted by acts of graffiti and violence becoming increasingly malevolent. For Jovan the mysterious words that must be cleaned away dislodge the poetry of the past. He and his wife Suzana were forced to flee Sarajevo and the death of their children.

'Intensely human, yet majestic in its moral vision, Black Rock White City is an essential story of Australia's suburbs now, of displacement and immediate threat, and the unexpected responses of two refugees as they try to reclaim their dreams. It is a breathtaking roar of energy that explores the immigrant experience with ferocity, beauty and humour.' (Publication summary)

'It was a clash of arms that would echo through the millennia: a hard-fought conflict born of love, pride, greed and revenge; a decade-long siege of the ancient world's greatest city from which nobody will escape unscathed.

'As urgent and passionate as if told for the first time, international besteller Colleen McCullough breathes life into legend, swinging our sympathies from Greece to Troy and back again as they move inexorably towards a fate not even the gods themselves can avert. Here are Greek princess Helen, sensuous and self-indulgent, who deserts a dull husband for the sake of the equally self-indulgent Trojan prince Paris; the haunted warrior Achilles; the heroically noble Hektor; the subtle and brilliant Odysseus; Priam, King of Troy, doomed to make the wrong decisions for the right reasons; and Agamemnon, King of Kings, who consents to the unspeakable to launch his thousand ships, incurring the terrifying wrath of his wife, Klytemnestra.'(Publication summary)