Cirrus@Austlit

'Cressida Mitsok is a successful construction lawyer about to make partner at a large city law firm. But to get that partnership, Cressida must defend the boss's daughter, an environmental activist who blew up a coal-fired power station. Cressida's client is a young hothead who has confessed to sabotage but who might be charged with terrorism. Impressed by her client’s passion, Cressida starts to question everything about her own life.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Antarctica is getting hotter …

'Summer Wright, hippie turned TV production assistant, organises her life down to the minute. And when her project-management-guru boyfriend, Adrian, proposes marriage — right on schedule — she will reach the peak of The Cone of Certainty.

'At least, that’s the plan – until adventure-show queen Cougar Gale intervenes. Suddenly Summer is impersonating Cougar in Antarctica: learning glaciology and climate science on the fly, building a secret igloo, improvising scripts based on Dynasty, and above all trying not to be revealed as an impostor.

'Summer finds it particularly hard to fool climate scientist Lucas Nilsson, who is babysitting the production crew. But Lucas is more focused on Adrian’s client Nathan Hornby — the science minister who thinks “climate science is crap” — and rumours of faked climate data.

'With Adrian unexpectedly in Antarctica too, can Summer use her extreme project management skills to get Project Adrian back on track and make a success of “Cougar on Ice”? Was Lucas involved in the sudden disappearance of Minister Hornby during a blizzard? And what is The Krill Question anyway?

'Antarctica — it gives you perspective …'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'When Mya Paw Wah commits a crime during a political protest in Yangon, she flees the city to avoid the fate of her father and brother – one a political prisoner, the other killed in the police action against the protest. Military Intelligence agents, human traffickers, landmines and snakes are among the dangers Mya faces in her journey to Karen State, near the Thai border, to find her exiled mother. To survive, she plays many roles – bar-girl, novice nun, military porter, teacher – some by choice, others forced on her, as she struggles to overcome anger and despair, and maintain hope for a better life.

'Tasmanian Nick Stanish comes to Thailand looking for his missing brother – an aid worker at a medical clinic for Karen refugees – and to avoid dealing with a guilty secret. Seeking answers in the Snake Skin nightclub, Nick instead finds the local Lady Gaga – the club’s star entertainer – and is drawn into a world of sex slavery and drug smugglers – and possibly love.

'Playing Lady Gaga, Being Nan Pau is a compelling tale of survival and redemption, of actions and consequences, and of the best and the worst of humanity.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Everyone controls Sophie. She can’t walk and she can’t talk, but behind her disability hides a keen intelligence. Living on The Styx River cattle station with her father and a nanny, Sophie is acutely aware that she is a non-person. She feels as voiceless and isolated as the wallabies of The Wall, an eerie wilderness of basalt lava tubes forming a natural stone labyrinth that protects its remote lushness from anyone foolish enough to wander in.

'Sophie’s mother Rose, as indigenous [sic] custodian, would take the young Sophie into the labyrinth and teach her its secrets. When a bitter divorce forces Rose to leave, Sophie is powerless to stop her grazier father from taking custody of both Sophie and The Wall.

'Advances in computer technology enable Sophie to communicate, a fact she keeps secret from her father and his “cronies”. In Sophie’s presence, unaware she understands everything, they plot to build a multi-million dollar tourist resort in The Wall. The development will only go ahead if the rare wallabies are already extinct, so they hire roo shooters to help nature along.  

'In desperation Sophie writes Silent Scream, an anonymous blog that reveals the plot. When an environmental study team commissioned to find the wallabies goes missing, the rescuers appeal to Silent Scream for help. Raising awareness is one thing, but how can one impossibly disabled girl who can’t help herself, help save the lives of others?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'White-out: selected published poems 1986–2016 brings together 194 of Tasmanian poet Saxby Pridmore’s published poems to commemorate his achievement and contribution to Australian poetry: more than 300 poems published in over 40 different literary magazines and journals, including Quadrant, Studio, Famous Reporter, Blue Dog, Overland and Island. ...'

'"David Edge is a Chinese Whisper." So Constable Carol Porter learns while digging into a cold case, unsure if she's investigating the crime, the crim or the ex-cop. When petty thief Ben Bovell wears a bomb into his daughter's day-care centre, Edge is the one person Ben will trust. In the aftermath, Edge too must delve into a past he'd prefer was undisturbed.' (Publication summary)

'Pull the pin, hear the ping, silver ball bounce and ding… Abel Jackson Marvin is in a coma reliving the pinball game of his life – the bumps and ricochets of bushfire, family breakup, heroic rescues, disabling and fatal accidents, marriage, fatherhood – while a clock counts away the seconds of his life and a female voice urges him to give a full account of himself.

'Throughout Abel’s time-travels in his foggy stream-of consciousness are two constants: his granny’s tray of sweeties ‘to balance out life’s nasties’ and the other members of the ‘Pinnie Basement Gang’, his best friends George and Roma. Roma’s pinball mantra keeps interrupting that other female voice as she sends him spinning into another memory: the night she slipped in through the basement window dragging a bottle of vodka, and hypnotised him with her magical hands.

'As the 3D visions flash before his eyes, Abel must decide whether to keep the silver ball on the playfield, or let the ball drain away: game over.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The Fifteens of Stone House have reached Attainment: the day ‘girlies’ may Beseech for the privilege of being Perfected and serving as womanidols in the Orchid Nursery. Among the Stone House girlies are Mica, a pious believer, and Pearl, vivacious and dangerously irreverent.

'When Pearl goes missing, Mica hopes fervently that her friend has been chosen for Perfection. But Mica finds stronger indications that Pearl has absconded, including a map that shows a path out of Perfect State towards the boundary where Civilisation meets Unrule. Mica feels bound by love and duty to seek Pearl — to save her from punishment if she is caught by the Ecumen or, worse, if she has left Civilisation.

Mica's search first takes her to Hagovel, the crossroads where the cursed Hag is suffered to exist in miserable solitude — an object lesson for the disobedient. Beyond Hagovel is a frightening physical and moral terrain where insurgents and outcasts are still fighting a strategic war against the clerical dictatorship.

'But first Mica must bring herself to violate the secret-sacred space that is the Orchid Nursery.' (Publication summary)

'“I crashed to the ground, landing sandwiched between the bitumen and the bike I was somehow expecting to ride solo and unsupported around Australia. I couldn’t even ride it to work without embedding bitumen into my knees and grating strips of skin from my forearms. What was I thinking?”

'After backpacking around Asia, Anne Fitzpatrick spent three months volunteering in rural India. Inspired by the program, she returned to Australia determined to raise funds for the education of young people in Kodaikanal, by cycling solo around Australia – despite having no experience of either long-distance cycling or fundraising.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'They say the past is another country but for Australian-born Lily the past is another language: Hungarian, the language of her migrant family, the language of secrets …

'But Lily’s family secrets hold the key to her father’s death from a mysterious illness she may have inherited. Just when any conversation becomes interesting, it trails off into Hungarian - a language Lily was never taught. If there’s one thing that Lily’s mother and grandmother agree on, it’s that Hungarian is impossible to learn.

'A chance encounter with Eva, the family’s nemesis, leads to illicit Hungarian lessons in Eva’s coffee shop. Between mouthfuls of black forest cake and Hungarian poetry, Lily learns more than she signed up for. Developing feelings for Nixon, the Hungarian but non-Jewish waiter, is a complication she doesn’t need.

'Can Lily keep her meetings with Eva and relationship with Nixon a secret long enough to unlock the past and possibly save her own life?' (Publication summary)

'After a lifetime in India, Philip returns to Australia, to his estranged wife Jenny, whom he had brought from India fifty years earlier. Philip seeks to establish links with his ex-wife and his grandson amidst the 2001 'Tampa' crisis. Displaced and disappointed in his hopes of resuming a career in his own country, Philip is visited by a ghost: Ragini, the young revolutionary he fell in love with in 1948. Philip is troubled by his unsorted memories of those times. In 1948 India has achieved its independence but the princely state of Hyderabad – the Nizam's Dominions – with its feudal splendours and deep pockets of rural poverty and injustice, totters alone, unwilling to accede to India, fighting Communist insurrection within. Philip, 'the world's youngest headmaster', has been appointed from Australia to a one-teacher school in the distant town of Warangal, a post no Hindu will take. He meets Anand, a Congress Party member working to bring Hyderabad into the Indian Union, and Ragini, the daughter of a landlord and a Communist, who has given away the family lands. A love triangle develops as events sweep them up – events that will return to life and take their toll half a century later. "The Last Candles of the Night" is a lyrical and moving tale of the pitfalls of memory and the costs of deep allegiance.' (Publication summary)

'Victoria Eliza Annie MacLean can’t escape actors. Her father Richard, who raised her in a bohemian and somewhat morally negligent household, is a famous actor. Her childhood playmate and “prince” Billy is inspired and encouraged by Richard to pursue his dream of acting. All the men she is seriously attracted to turn out to be actors – and not just in their professional lives.

'With so much drama in her life, Eliza is determined to be normal and – like many people from dysfunctional families – become a psychologist, despite her faerie looks and her penchant for playing bluegrass fiddle. Indeed, Eliza’s life is anything but normal.' (Publisher's blurb)

'When the new goth girl in town Maggie befriends town misfit Lily, they discover more in common than their taste in alternative music: a disdain for the "popular" and "normal", psychic abilities, and the same dark secret.

'United in their struggle against society's rules, Lily frequently wishes for death while Maggie wants a better kind of existence — and revenge.

'When a dark spell performed in teenage despair is invoked years later, they are plunged into the demon world, a world that has its own rules, family bonds, and mortal enemies they never even knew existed.

'Suddenly the darkness within, the victim's desire for power over aggressors, and blood lust become literal matters of life and death. Lily and Maggie are forced to question what they really value — including each other.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Life becomes complicated for Simon - a fundamentalist preacher and marriage guidance counsellor - when he realises in between adulterous affairs that he is, in fact, an atheist. From his dingy office in Kings Cross, from the pulpit, and from the beds of his lovers, Simon sorrowfully observes the hypocrisies and corruption of the worlds that he inhabits. And sometimes he embraces them.

'Raunchy and blasphemous, provocative and funny, Falling Backwards follows Simon from his flock at Sunday School to his ministry in the brothels of Kings Cross, and asks us to wonder whether Simon may not be something of a saint after all.' (Publisher's blurb)

'From da kokroach point of view, humans are irrelvant. Kokroaches no like em. Doan want em. Do not even tink bout em. Doan care for deh conversations. Books we like to eat, not read. We wish humans dead so we can eat em too. — Sizwe Bantu, The Cockroach Whisperer, 2010.

'Sizwe Bantu is the Greatest African Writer of All Time – according to Timothy Turner, failed academic and lover, who not only lives by Bantu’s words but keeps a giant rubber cockroach in homage to the writer of the renowned ‘cockroach stories’.

'Inspired to travel to Bantu country, Timothy takes up a position at a university near the place rumoured to be the reclusive writer’s residence in the misty Zululand hills. Instead of drawing closer to his source of inspiration, Timothy is drawn into a Machiavellian world of campus politics and suppressed desire.

'As Timothy grapples with the mystery surrounding Makaya, the academic he has replaced, and the demands of his students, particularly the attractive Tracey, he must confront his own paranoia, prejudice and insecurity in a search for the shocking truth.' (Publication abstract)

'Fukuoka relates the experiences of two Australian brothers, Alf and Wally, in a prisoner-of-war camp in Japan during the Second World War, expressed in poetry in the voice of the surviving brother Alf.

'Based on the lives of his own great-uncles, Andrew Sneddon’s poetry captures the intimacy that exists between brothers, while reflecting on the psychology of the human condition in ways that transcend the particular. Sneddon’s verse contemplates life and death, brutality and kindness, beauty and horror, courage and cowardice. It reflects on suffering and the consequences of suffering.

'Each poem — some bleak, some uplifting, some confronting and others soothing — will move readers in different ways. Fukuoka is poetry for those who question what it is to be human.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The Wait-a-While Vine is a poetic imagining of the doomed Cape York expedition of Edmund Kennedy and Jacky Jacky in 1848. The verses merge landscape and dreamscape, history and legend. Beginning with the young Kennedy’s life in England and ending with Jacky Jacky’s death, the poems traverse topics as diverse as the terrain covered by the explorers.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Ghost Armies presents Andrew Sneddon’s poetic works Fukuoka and The Wait-a-While Vine in one volume. Sneddon’s connected verses explore two defining episodes in Australia’s history and provide emotional and cultural insights of both personal and universal import.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.