Cirrus@Austlit

'In October 1997 a clever young law student at ANU made a bizarre plan to murder her devoted boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the dinner guests - most of them university students - had heard rumours of the plan. Nobody warned Joe Cinque. He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of rohypnol and heroin. His girlfriend and her best friend were charged with murder. Helen Garner followed the trials in the ACT Supreme Court. Compassionate but unflinching, this is a book about how and why Joe Cinque died. It probes the gap between ethics and the law; examines the helplessness of the courts in the face of what we think of as 'evil'; and explores conscience, culpability, and the battered ideal of duty of care.' (Source: Pan Macmillan website)

Garner takes 'a deliberately subjective and "literary" approach' to her material with an 'emphasis on a sympatheitic authorial persona as the source of the reader's perspective' (Susan Lever 'The Crimes of the Past: Anna Funder's Stasiland and Helen Garner's Joe Cinque's Consolation'. Paper delivered at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference 2006).

'"House in Gastouri for rent for 2 mths. Occupant travelling. Reasonable rent."

In a village on the island of Corfu, alone in the cottage of a man he's never met, a young Australian actor pieces together the strange life story of the writer whose house he's living in. As he explores his surroundings and makes new friends in Corfu, his own life begins to appear to him like an illuminating shadow-play of his absent host's.

Set in the physical landscapes of the Greek islands, Adelaide and the suburbs of London, Robert Dessaix's second novel is about friendship, love, the ordinary and extraordinary. Yet at its core is a perfectly placed meditation on literary landscapes–Homer, Sappho, Cavafy and Chekhov–and the part art can play in making our lives beautiful' (publisher blurb).