Cirrus@Austlit

'Interviewing more than 30 Australia-based authors and thinkers while examining his own journey towards being openly non-monogamous, Poly author Paul Dalgarno pulls together social history and illuminating first-hand accounts of what it means to have 'unconventional' relationships – with others and even with ourselves – in 21st-century Australia.

'Do authors such as Christos Tsiolkas, Dennis Altman and Andrea Goldsmith think we're more tolerant than we once were? Are writers such as Lee Kofman, Rochelle Siemienowicz and Jinghua Qian optimistic about the future? Do terms such as LGBTQIA+ help or hinder meaningful progress? How does transitioning now compare to transitioning in the 1990s? How does 'queerness' affect notions of parenthood? Do therapists and psychologists still operate from a straight-white-male perspective and how can new practitioners such as popular psychologist and author Chris Cheers change that?

'Entertaining, insightful, funny and thought-provoking, Prudish Nation adjusts the country's bedside lamp to show us a little more clearly who and what we really are.' (Publication summary)

'Margaret Bryce, deceased mother of twins, has been having a hard time since dying in 2014. These days she spends time with her daughters – Eva in Madrid, and Rachel and her family in Melbourne – and her estranged husband, Henry, in Aberdeen. Mostly she enjoys the experience of revisiting the past, but she's tiring of the seemingly random events to which she repeatedly bears witness. There must be something more to life, she thinks. And death.

'Spanning more than seventy-five years, from 1945 to 2021, A Country of Eternal Light follows Margaret as she flits from wartime Germany to Thatcher's Britain to modern-day Scotland, Australia and Spain, ruminating on everything from the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster and Australia's Black Summer bushfires to Mary Queen of Scots' beheading, the death of Princess Diana and in-vitro fertilisation. But why is facing up to what's happened in one's past as hard as, if not harder than, blocking it out completely? A poignant, utterly original and bitingly funny novel about complicated grief and how we remain wanted by our loved ones, dead or alive.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'We routinely think of the past as a subtext of the present, but in The Women of Little Lon Barbara Minchinton flips this around. She aims not only to ‘dismantle the myths and counter misinformation and deliberate distortions’ about sex workers in nineteenth-century Melbourne, but – in an explicitly #MeToo context – to ‘reduce the stigma attached to the work today’ while heightening our ‘understanding of and respect for the lives of all sex workers’.' (Introduction)

'Ambiguity, done well, has a bifurcating momentum that can floor you. The late Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, a master of unsettling short stories shot through with ambiguity, knew this and used it to pugilistic advantage, declaring that ‘the novel wins by points, the short story by knockout’. Ambiguity is likewise central to S.J. Norman’s début collection, Permafrost, seven eerily affecting stories that traverse and update gothic and romantic literary traditions, incorporating horror, queer, and folk elements to hair-raising effect. No matter how often you read these spectral tales, they simply refuse to resolve themselves definitively. It could be that things have gone spectacularly wrong and that, simultaneously, everything is okay – a see-saw in constant motion, made all the creepier by the fact nobody is sitting on either side.' (Introduction)

'Wanting to belong forms the root system of Belinda Probert’s Imaginative Possession, marking the terrain – how can she, as an immigrant, ever feel at home in Australia? – and producing shoots of longing for the landscapes of her English childhood. Even now, forty-five years after arriving in Perth to take up a teaching position at Murdoch University, after which she lived briefly in Adelaide before raising a family in Melbourne, that question lingers. Specifically, given that she feels at ease with the people and culture, why does she still feel needled by the natural environment?'  (Introduction)

'Chris Flood – a married father of two with plummeting self-esteem and questionable guitar skills – suddenly finds himself in the depths of polyamory after years of a near-sexless marriage. His wife, Sarah – a lover of the arts, avid quoter of Rumi, and always oozing confidence – wants to rediscover her sexuality after years of deadening domesticity.

'Their new life of polyamory features late nights, love affairs and rotating childcare duties. While Sarah enjoys flings with handsome men, Chris, much to his astonishment, falls for a polydactylous actor and musician, Biddy.

'Then there’s Zac Batista. When Chris and Sarah welcome the Uruguayan child prodigy and successful twenty-two-year-old into their lives they gratefully hand over school pick-up and babysitting duties. But as tensions grow between family and lovers, Chris begins to wonder if it’s just jealousy, or something more sinister brewing…

'A searing and utterly engrossing debut, Poly is a raw, hilarious, and moving portrait of contemporary relationships in all their diversity, and an intimate exploration of the fragility of love and identity. ' (Publication summary)

'And You May Find Yourself is the hilarious and harrowing account of a Scottish émigré in Melbourne, in search of a job so that his young family can live, and desperately at odds with his new found role as father and bread-winner. Living in his in-laws’ lounge room with mounting disgust growing between him and his wife and a tenuous hold on an emotional connection with his two children, Paul’s life is cramped, poor, and seemingly adrift from the future he thought he would have for himself. A brave, enthralling memoir loaded with pathos that will leave you pondering on your own life journey long after you’ve turned the final page.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.