Cirrus@Austlit

'It is proof of a fine novel when its characters enter your spirit as you are reading and take up residence there. The experience is akin to falling in love. You are vividly enveloped by thoughts of another. They are alive inside you, perceiving the world with you, breath by breath. It is the most intimate of feelings. Film can’t achieve this, or theatre, or visual art; perhaps music gets closest. It’s only the novel that can show you the grain of another’s soul.' (Introduction)

'This is a story about strangeness and familiarity. It begins in the year I turned twenty. I was working as a park ranger in Central Australia. One day a local Anangu woman came into the ranger station and handed me a white plastic shopping bag. ‘Itjaritjari,’ she said.' (Introduction)

'Carrie Tiffany’s new novel Exploded View is the first featured book in Guardian Australia’s new highlights series, The Unmissables. In this exclusive essay, Tiffany meditates on her childhood and the highways and dirt tracks she drove as an adult trying to reconcile her youth with the writer she had become.' (Introduction)

'A dangerous man moves in with a mother and her two adolescent children. The man runs an unlicensed mechanic’s workshop at the back of their property. The girl resists the man with silence, and finally with sabotage. She fights him at the place where she believes his heart lives—in the engine of the car.

'Set at the close of the 1970s and traversing thousands of kilometres of inland roads, Exploded View is a revelatory interrogation of Australian girlhood.

'Must a girl always be a part—how can she become a whole?' (Publication summary)

'On the outskirts of an Australian country town in the 1950s, a lonely farmer trains his binoculars on a family of kookaburras that roost in a tree near his house. Harry observes the kookaburras through a year of feast, famine, birth, death, war, romance and song. As Harry watches the birds, his next door neighbour has her own set of binoculars trained on him.

'Ardent, hard-working Betty has escaped to the country with her two fatherless children. Betty is pleased that her son, Michael, wants to spend time with the gentle farmer next door. But when Harry decides to teach Michael about the opposite sex, perilous boundaries are crossed.

'Mateship with Birds is a novel about young lust and mature love. It is a hymn to the rhythm of country life - to vicious birds, virginal cows, adored dogs and ill-used sheep. On one small farm in a vast, ancient landscape, a collection of misfits question the nature of what a family can be.' (From the publisher's website.)