Cirrus@Austlit

'Perth novelist and poet Tracy Ryan’s fifth novel, We Are Not Most People, is the story of two outsiders.'

'In 1982, Sofija Stefanovic is born into a stable and peaceful Yugoslavia. Marshal Tito is dead but the guiding principles of Brotherhood and Unity that have held the republic together for 40 years are holding firm. With a doting extended family, and parents who have enjoyed the socialist republic’s free education system to become professionals – her father an engineer and her mother a psychologist – her early childhood is happy.' (Introduction)

'In the winter of 1962, 17-year-old Radford is brought from London to Goodwin Manor, somewhere in the English Midlands. While we don’t know why Radford has been brought here, we learn that the manor is an institution for boys who have been “found by trouble”. He is taken to Teddy, the eccentric, kindly man in charge, who tells him practically nothing about the place, and who banishes another boy to the chicken coops to make room for him. Radford promptly gets swept up in the commotion of this lark as crowds of boys clear out the boy’s things and set them back up in the coops, and his first impression of the other residents, these marauding bodies and “sallow figures scoffing and competing”, is of a whirlwind of activity.' (Publication summary)

'In Can You Hear the Sea? Brenda Niall, author of biographies of Martin Boyd, Judy Cassab and Daniel Mannix, trains her eye on her grandmother, Agnes “Aggie” Maguire. ' (Introduction)

'Michael Fitzgerald’s debut, The Pacific Room, is putatively a novel about the last days of Robert Louis Stevenson. After several years travelling around the Pacific, the Scottish author of Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde spent the last four years of his life in Samoa, on a 160-hectare estate. He became known to the locals as Tusitala (“the teller of tales”), became embroiled in local politics, and was buried there, on top of a mountain.'