Cirrus@Austlit

'When a young writer is hired to put together the life of an unknown artist from Geelong, of all places, she thinks it will be just another quick commission paid for by a rich, grieving family obsessed with their own past.

'But Edna Cranmer was not a privileged housewife with a paintbrush. Edna’s work spans decades. Her soaring images of red dirt, close interiors and distant jungles have the potential to change the way the nation views itself.

'Edna could have been an official war artist. Did she choose to hide herself away? Or were there people who didn’t want her to be famous? As the biographer is pulled into Edna’s life, she is confronted with the fact that how she tells Edna's past will affect her own future.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Jakarta, 1997, and the city is on the verge of a revolution.

'Even the Jordan children — Petra, Isaak and Paul — can feel it coming, shaking the edges of their privileged, protected expat world.

'Years later, Diana, an Australian development worker, moves to Jakarta and becomes entwined in the powerful Jordans' adult lives. As the monsoon descends, and the Jordans begin to fall apart, Diana sinks into the half-light of their past, where rumour and religion define the contours of the real, and the rules of the game change according to who is playing.

'Set in a global city of poverty, beauty, corruption and extreme wealth, Running Dogs is a novel about power and responsibility; about the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive, and the damage they can do.' (From the publisher's website.)

'It’s been three years since Roxanne had sex. For the first six months, it had been funny. Sitting with Rita and Linda in cafés on Brunswick Street, in the city, in Collingwood, she’d thrown her arms up in the air and said things like ‘Six months, I mean, what the fuck is that, right?’ And they’d all laughed, as if there was something exciting and even naughty about not having sex in six whole months. By that August, she was shocked to realise that she’d been making the ‘six months’ joke for a whole year. ‘Twelve months’ just didn’t have the same sound as ‘six months’. At the end of eighteen months, she stopped talking about it altogether. When the topic of sex came up, as it invariably did, she sidestepped, laughed, said ‘not as frequently as I’d like’ or something equally inane, and moved the conversation away from herself.'  (Introduction)