Cirrus@Austlit

'Blue is the debut graphic novel by Australian cartoonist Pat Grant. Part autobiography and part science fiction, the book follows three spotty teenagers who skip school to go surfing and end up investigating rumors of a dead body on the train line. Provincial values and the emotions aroused by immigration clash as the teenagers encounter strange, blue-skinned foreigners that have arrived in their little beach town. Things become even more confronting when the trail leads them to make first contact with a new wave of immigrants to their coastal town, who might be the harbingers of sweeping change.

'Blue is a delicate and affectionate portrayal of an iconic setting and way of life, told with an unerring ear and eye for the vernacular. But it's also a story about difference, fear and change, and the political implications of this for contemporary Australia.

'Pat Grant's approach to cartooning is largely an old-fashioned one, with each page of images painstakingly drawn on large pieces of illustration board with a sable brush and India ink. The images in Blue have been taken directly from drawings collected over many mornings on the beaches of NSW and Victoria; they are inspired by real life but don't lose their cartoonish charm. Combined with Grant's sparse writing the result is a cinematic story telling experience that lends itself particularly to an Australian experience of place and landscape.' (From the publisher's website.)

Swallow the Air follows the life of 15-year-old May Gibson, an Aboriginal girl from New South Wales whose mother commits suicide. May and her brother go to live with their aunt, but eventually May travels further afield, first to Redfern's Block in Sydney, then to the Northern Territory, and finally into central New South Wales. She travels to escape, but also in pursuit of a sense of her own history, family, and identity.

'In the magnificent opening story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," a young writer is urged by his friends to mine his father's experiences in Vietnam - and what seems at first a satire on turning one's life into literary commerce becomes a transcendent exploration of homeland, and the ties between father and son. "Cartagena" provides a visceral glimpse of life in Colombia as it enters the mind of a fourteen-year-old hit man facing the ultimate test. In "Meeting Elise" an ageing New York painter mourns his body's decline as he prepares to meet his daughter on the eve of her Carnegie Hall debut. And with graceful symmetry, the final, title story returns to Vietnam, to a fishing trawler crowded with refugees where a young woman's bond with a mother and her small son forces both women to a shattering decision.' (From the author's website.)