Cirrus@Austlit

'In this episode, a conversation with award-winning writer Steven Carroll, author of Death of a Foreign Gentleman, the first book in a series of post-war literary crime novels featuring Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter.

'Set in Cambridge in 1947, the book is a playful, poignant and absorbing novel, with shades of The Third Man and Brighton Rock, which examines the question of how to live a meaningful life in an indifferent, random, post-God world.'  (Introduction)

'Handywoman Barb Young has lived in the sleepy coastal town of Bullford Point for over fifty years —and frankly, in that time, not much has happened, unless you count that business where a bush turkey managed to board the ferry a couple of years ago.

'When Joe Griffiths returns from Sydney after six years of drug addiction, jail and, eventually, rehab, Barb offers him a job, hoping to help him turn his life around. However, when another new resident of Bullford Point is murdered, Joe becomes the prime suspect.

'Barb thinks the police have got it wrong, but the more she tries to find the truth and clear Joe's name, the more confusing things become. Is the murder connected to the developers circling the waterfront home Joe inherited from his parents? Or to the true crime podcast he has been making about the death of his ex-girlfriend, seven years previously? And what was the information the murdered woman had been trying to horse-trade with police? ' (Publication summary)

'An endearing, charming, honest, funny, sad, tender and beautiful literary memoir. Think Patti Smith meet Dylan Thomas, by way of Banjo Paterson.

'Tim Rogers - the front man and singer of hugely popular rock n'roll band You Am I - is a shambolic, flamboyant and dapper Aussie flaneur - a seeker after truth, love and understanding. He's a contradiction: a hard drinking rock star with the soul of a poet; a wordsmith and a raconteur, a romantic and a realist, a bon vivant op-shop-dressed dandy. He's the wild man of Australian rock n' roll, a man who loves footy, who was brought up in the wild emptiness of Kalgoorlie, but he's now an urban hipster - a legend of Australian rock music, more at home in St Kilda than the bush.

'In this offbeat and immensely charming literary memoir, Tim Rogers talks about what it is to be a man, about accepting who you are, about masculinity, love, drinking, footy, his father, being a dad, anxiety, and above all, his continuing, magical, ever-present muse - music. It is by turns revealing, warm, self-deprecating, intimate, shocking, confessional, sharp, funny and immensely engaging.' (Publication summary)

'His achingly lyrical first solo album, What Rhymes with Cars and Girls, cemented You Am I frontman Tim Rogers’ already formidable reputation as one of Australia’s premier songwriters. Playwright Aidan Fennessy has threaded these beautiful songs across the class divide to create a tale of love in contemporary Australia.

'This is the ballad of Tash and Johnno, brought together by a conjunction of the stars and a pizza delivery gone weird. Tash is a smart-mouthed singer in a band and Johnno’s a three-time loser from the wrong side of the tracks. But, what do you know? It’s love. Almighty love. With an authentic catch and pain in it, like a song in the throat of one who knows how it goes. Knows how love can lift you high and dash you down. Knows that it’s never the coming together, it’s the holding on.

'What Rhymes with Cars and Girls is a raw, complex, urban romance, a balm for the hardest of hearts and solace for anyone who’s ever been in love.' (Production summary)