Cirrus@Austlit

'Once they were just them. Now they're forty-something and there's kids. Whose time is this?

'Phil is trying to feel closer to his recently passed mother by spending time alone at his parent's house on the coast. But he is lonely, and stupidly he's invited a bunch of old friends to visit. It's bound to be a mistake. All those children! But it's too late now, and tomorrow Bella and Tim will arrive with their two kids, one on the brink of puberty, and the next day Jo and Lucas will come too, with their little one. Then there's Annie, who will be by herself.

'The story of a beach holiday told by four different people, Time Together is a novel about different kinds of love, different kinds of loneliness, and the way spending time together can bring out the best and worst in each other.'  (Publication summary)

'On the afternoon of November 9, 1983, Michael Shelley kidnapped his son, Elijah, from his foster home in Brisbane with a hitchhiking hippie, Glen, as accomplice. Michael had picked up Glen only a few days earlier, but Glen was a lost young man looking for meaning and he’d met his perfect match in Michael, who was a charming megalomaniac looking for disciples.'(Introduction)   

'In Patrick Holland’s new literary thriller, an unnamed narrator drifts through the glittering non-places of Asian modernity – chain hotels, airports, megacities – brokering million-dollar trade deals and engaging reluctantly in light espionage. At night, he checks into hotel rooms in interchangeable cities, and pursues “chance liaisons” with exotic, unknowable women, before courting oblivion with whisky and opium.' (Introduction)

'In Sarah Sasson’s debut novel, Tidelines, Grub and Elijah share an idyllic childhood in the suburbs of Sydney, surfing and exploring nature with their birdwatching father. But when they finish high school and begin their adult lives in the city – and obsessive artist Elijah discovers drugs – Grub watches as her brother’s life spirals out of control.' (Introduction)

'Journalist and author Martin Flanagan attended a Catholic boarding school in Tasmania from 1966 to 1971. It was after a third priest from his time at the school was convicted of sexual crimes that he began this memoir. It was 2019, George Pell’s guilty verdict was being challenged in the High Court, and the debate around paedophile priests was raging. Everyone in the media seemed certain about what happened in schools like his and yet, for Flanagan and his brothers, none of it was clear at all. Not that he doubted the victims – in a 2007 trial, he had given evidence against one of the priests – but as a journalist he knew how unreliable memory could be. Perhaps now was the time to see what he did remember.' (Introduction)

'Emily Bitto’s first novel since her 2015 Stella Prize-winning debut, The Strays, is the coming-of-age story of 22-year-old Will. It is 2011 and, reeling from a bad break-up, Will flees Melbourne for the United States in search of “experience” and “the grand American ideal of self-determination”.' (Introduction)

'A compelling tale of the slow disintegration of a relationship and the unravelling of a man.

'Tom and Clara are two struggling academics in their mid-thirties, who decide to take their first holiday in ten years. On the flight over to Indonesia, Tom experiences a debilitating panic attack, something he hasn't had in a long time, which he keeps hidden from Clara. At the resort, they meet Madeleine, a charismatic French woman, her Australian partner, Jeremy, and five-year-old son, Ollie, and the two couples strike up an easy friendship. The holiday starts to look up, even to Tom, who is struggling to get out of his own head. But when Clara and Madeleine become trapped in the maze-like grounds of the hotel during 'the fogging' - a routine spraying of pesticide - the dynamics suddenly shift between Tom and Clara, and the atmosphere of the holiday darkens.

'Told with equal parts compassion and irony, and brimming with observations that charm, illuminate, and devastate, The Fogging dives deep into what it means to be strong when your foundation is built on sand.' (Publication summary)

'The sixth and final novel of Steven Carroll’s Glenroy series takes us back to where this intergenerational saga begins, to Melbourne in 1917, and to Maryanne, a 40-year-old woman who is pregnant with an illegitimate child; a child who is “the egg from which a story would be hatched”.' (Introduction)