Cirrus@Austlit

'The Sunken Road is many roads, taking different paths through the terrain of a life, a family, a history and a region. It is a road called Loss, a road called Secrets, a road called Love—and a road called Sunken. Lyrical, expansive and profoundly moving, this is a novel like no other.

'The town of Pandowie in the mid-north of South Australia has been shaped for generations by two families, the Isons and the Showalters. At their conjunction lies a tragedy that cannot be glimpsed directly but sits at the centre of Anna Tolley’s long life, pulling at her past and future. Anna’s story and all her secrets are exposed through a series of prisms, drawing themes and connections from her life and her surroundings, each revealing a different facet and combining into a tender and devastating whole.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Ligature ed.)

'When you travel across the ocean on a boat, all your memories are washed away and you start a completely new life. That is how it is. There is no before. There is no history. The boat docks at the harbour and we climb down the gangplank and we are plunged into the here and now. Time begins.'

'David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simón and Inés take care of him in their new country. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog Bolívar to watch over him. But he’ll be seven soon. He should be at school. And so David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance in Estrella. It’s here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. But it’s here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what grown-ups are capable of.'

'The Schooldays of Jesus, the startling sequel to J. M. Coetzee’s widely praised The Childhood of Jesus, will beguile its readers. With the mysterious simplicity of a fable, it tells a story that raises the most direct questions about life itself.' (Source: Text Publishing website)

'"Bunyah has been my refuge and home place all my life. This book concentrates on the smallest habitats of community, the scattered village and the lone house, where space makes the isolated dwelling into an illusory distant city ruled by its family and their laws."

'On Bunyah tells a story of rural Australia in verse and photographs. From blood and fenceposts to broad beans and milk lorries, Les Murray evokes the life and landscape of his part of the country.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Black Rock White City is a novel about the damages of war, the limits of choice, and the hope of love. During a hot Melbourne summer Jovan's cleaning work at a bayside hospital is disrupted by acts of graffiti and violence becoming increasingly malevolent. For Jovan the mysterious words that must be cleaned away dislodge the poetry of the past. He and his wife Suzana were forced to flee Sarajevo and the death of their children.

'Intensely human, yet majestic in its moral vision, Black Rock White City is an essential story of Australia's suburbs now, of displacement and immediate threat, and the unexpected responses of two refugees as they try to reclaim their dreams. It is a breathtaking roar of energy that explores the immigrant experience with ferocity, beauty and humour.' (Publication summary)

'When A.J. Mackinnon quits his job in Australia, he knows only that he longs to travel to the Well at the World's End, a mysterious pool on a remote Scottish island whose waters, legend has it, hold the secret to eternal youth.

'Determined not to fly ("It would feel like cheating"), he sets out with a rucksack, some fireworks and a map of the world and trusts chance to take care of the rest. By land and by sea, by train, truck, horse and yacht, he makes his way across the globe - and through a series of hilarious adventures. He survives a bus crash in Australia, marries a princess in Laos, is attacked by Komodo dragons and does time in a Chinese jail. The next lift - or the next near-miss - is always just a happy accident away.

'This is the astonishing true story of a remarkable voyage, an old-fashioned quest by a modern-day adventurer.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Ruby White has burnt her bridges. She has no job, no direction in life, and just enough money to last a month, if she eats only rice and her cat catches his own meals. When her best friend, Anise, holds a dress-up party, Ruby drowns her sorrows and meets Damien, whose vampire costume belies his sweet nature.

With time on her hands, Ruby soon finds herself at a seminar for those who are Hyper-Auto-Aware, a condition she never knew existed, run by the Jaasmyn Empire, a company she's never heard of. To Ruby's astonishment, and that of those who know her, she is offered a job. Providing everything from meditation CDs, candles and 'specialised sleeping aides' (otherwise known as pillows) to private classes with a psychic therapist (a parrot), the Empire offers solutions for every physical and metaphysical problem ever conceived, and many that haven't been. Ruby swiftly gains a reputation within the Empire for possessing extraordinary abilities even though her 'talents' are in fact no more than guesswork and sarcasm.

Attracting the attention of the charismatic head of the Empire, Jaasmyn, Ruby ignores her misgivings about the Empire's ethics and enjoys fitting in somewhere for the first time in her life. When the reactions of those outside the Jaasmyn Empire become more cynical and her cautious relationship with Damien wavers, Ruby begins to keep her job details secret. As her training progresses, her parents become even more concerned. It seems the zany girl who used to eat chocolate for breakfast and salted pretzels for dinner won't touch anything that isn't organic and the further Ruby penetrates the Empire, the more her behaviour begins to change.

As Ruby disappears into the mire of mind, body and spirit, her friends and family try numerous ways to lure her back but their efforts only push her more into the arms of the Jaasmyn Empire and its mysterious leader. Fortunately Ruby's friend at the empire, DeDe, is onto Jaasmyn and orchestrates an unforgettable media expose.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Stripped of his private detective licence and devastated by the murder of his partner Lily Truscott, Cliff Hardy travels to the US to help Lily's brother's tilt for a world boxing title. In San Diego he suffers a heart attack and undergoes a quadruple bypass. He meets nurse Margaret McKinley, an expatriate Australian who is concerned about the disappearance in Sydney of her father - renowned geologist Dr Henry McKinley.

'Hardy takes on the investigation, and it turns out that McKinley had discovered a way to tap into the massive Sydney basin aquifer, a possible solution to the city's water problems. Working with Margaret and his daughter Megan, Hardy confronts an old enemy and opposing forces of big business bent on exploiting the discovery - and prepared to kill for it.

'Energised by the case and by his attachment to Margaret, Hardy obeys the strict rules for the restoration of his health - but in pursuing the truth and the malefactors, he makes his own rules.'

'Gemma Lincoln ... has to find the murderer of a police superintendent. But will the Force close around her? Is a cop the killer? Private Investigator Gemma Lincoln is back. A brother and sister-in-law are shot dead in the hallway of their family home. The dead man, Bryson Finn, was a police superintendent; his bereaved wife, Natalie Sutherland, is a former detective. Was this a case of cop killing cop? Natalie hires Gemma to find out, fearing that the Force will close ranks to keep it quiet. That might not be the smartest thing Ms Sutherland has ever done ...

'While trying to solve this bloody crime, and the many minor skirmishes that help pay the bills for a PI, Gemma has to make tough decisions about her own life. Is she in love with Steve? Will she tell him about the baby? Can she be a mother on her own?'

'Melbourne, 1871: John King is dying far from the deserts he traversed with the legendary Burke and Wills. Ten years on from that fateful expedition - the first to cross the Australian continent from south to north - King is finally ready to tell his story.The young Irishman had already endured the horrors of the Indian Mutiny when he signed on with the erratic Burke to explore a land he knew little about. As one of the advance group who were later abandoned by the rest of their party, King was with Wills as he penned his final letter; at Burke's side when he died. Then he was alone, the sole survivor, though barely alive when rescued by Alfred Howitt. But Howitt is a man who cannot let things be, and now he seems more inquisitor than saviour. He wants to know what King knows before it is too late . . .Effortlessly blending fact and fiction, this gripping novel brings to life the forgotten man of the most mythologised journey in Australia's history.' (Publication summary)

'Heroes, visionaries and eccentrics…

'Outback writer Marie Mahood is the author of the much loved Icing on the Damper and A Bunch of Strays. In the 1960’s she raised cattle and kids on the world’s most remote cattle station, Mongrel Downs, in the Tanami Desert.

'Here she writes about the heroes, visionaries and eccentrics of Australia’s vast outback. Her thirty-two characters include the greatest drover and Gulf trekker of them all, Nat Buchanan: prince of poddy-dodgers Harry Redford; the cattle king Sidney Kidman; outback surveyor supreme and all-round good bloke Len Beadell; Aboriginal warrior Jandamarra; Mat Wilson at the N.T. Depot store; gun shearer Jackie Howe; drover Edna Zigenbine on the Murranji Track; explorer and goldmine Christy Palmerston in the heartland of Cape York Peninsula; eccentrics such as the Gulf Hero and the Barkly Hermit; and drovers who were also painters and poets of repute.' (Publication summary)