Cirrus@Austlit

'Leslie Bird loves being a wife and mother but loathes her husband and children. The only person she ever loved was born dead.

'Meet Leslie Bird, the irascible matriarch of a big bonkers family, coming of age and to the boil, as the secrets and slights that have shaped her and her hapless husband's lives impact their children in the most profound and complex ways. In other words, everyone's story. Sort of. Because this is a story, and family, like none you've ever read before.

'Things She Would Have Said Herself is a darkly funny, deeply moving novel about the lengths and breadths one woman will go to ignore her own and others' pain and what happens when she's confronted by it one sweltering Christmas day.

'A story of motherhood, marriage, madness, unspeakable loss and the heartbreaking messy love that holds a family together. Honest, revealing, resonant and startlingly original, if you loved Olive Kitteridge and Boy Swallows Universe, you will love this book!' (Publication summary)

'The Weight of Silence is the gravity of all the unsaids, the unseens, and how they shape our lives. A father s drinking, a mother s shame, a daughter s longing to hold onto a trouser leg to hear someone speak of what never happened.

The Weight of Silence = 9 lbs 4 ozs.

In her achingly funny, heartbreaking childhood memoir, Catherine Therese takes the reader inside her head, and upside down on a unique emotional rollercoaster from picking her belly button in her backyard in Blacktown, pulling her hair out standing on her head, to the stage; hiding inside her wardrobe interpreting silence, to the bedroom of a boy with half a thumb and to the labour ward, in an unforgettable story of remembering, forgetting, pretending, of becoming who you are.' (From the publisher's website.)