Cirrus@Austlit

'“Who will write the history of tears?” The narrator of Michelle de Kretser’s seventh novel returns to this question from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse (1977). Named once fleetingly, she is a writer, glancing back to growing up in Sri Lanka before her family migrated to Sydney, then reflecting on living in Melbourne to write a thesis on Virginia Woolf. Though her Sydney boyfriend has betrayed her, desire remains as central to her attention as the question of what a novel can do.' (Introduction)   

'Each of the 12 stories in Fiona McFarlane’s fourth book, Highway 13, relates to a serial killer’s crimes. Set in different times and places, McFarlane’s stories work loosely with the facts of seven murders in the Belanglo State Forest south of Sydney. The disappearance of a series of young travellers from 1989 remained a mystery until several years later when seven bodies were found in shallow forest graves. Ivan Milat, convicted of these “backpacker murders”, was a suspect in relation to scores of unsolved murders and disappearances, and the evidence suggests he did not always act alone. The brutality of the crimes, the testimony of survivor Paul Onions and Milat’s refusal to confess fuelled intense media and community fascination.' (Introduction)

'A living songbook more than four years in the making, Andrew Ford’s hymnal brings together the words of sixteen contemporary Australian writers – poets, essayists and folksingers – in songs of praise, awe, grief, hope, joy, and natural splendour, dedicated not to a god, but to the land.

'The ever-daring voices of Luminescence Chamber Singers join forces with two rising stars: Hilary Geddes, 2021 Freedman Jazz Fellow and lead guitarist of Triple J favourites The Buoys, and category-defying cellist Freya Schack-Arnott. Red Dirt Hymns unfolds to the evocative imagery of Sammy Hawker, whose art is created within the fabric of country itself: saltwater, limestone and eucalypt.

'From Ellen van Neerven’s dark clouds to John Kinsella’s abundant gardens, Red Dirt Hymns does what a hymnal is meant to do: it draws us closer – to each other, and to the light and shade of our wide brown land.'

Source: Canberra International Music Festival.

'When Ariane Beeston gave birth to her son she was working in child protection as a newly registered psychologist. Years before, she’d won a ballet and dance scholarship to a Sydney private school, which led to performing with the English National Ballet, winning ballet competitions and blitzing exams. When puberty arrived, this changed. Too short, too muscular – so the arbiters said – Beeston was made to feel “too much and not enough”. Pregnancy renewed this scrutiny of her body, reigniting “tracking, monitoring, obsessing” over her size, and parenting brought other kinds of scrutiny, most with limited capacity to detect maternal mental health conditions.' (Introduction)

'The protagonist of Gail Jones’s One Another accidentally leaves the manuscript of the book she is writing on a train. Helen is a PhD student from Tasmania who is living in Cambridge while she researches and writes a thesis on Joseph Conrad, the Ukrainian-born mariner and writer who eventually settled in England. Neither a conventional scholarly account of Conrad’s work nor a true biography, the manuscript slips away from Helen’s possession just as it slips from the moorings of conventional categories of form.' (Introduction)

'Posthumous work has a spectral quality. It’s haunting to hear so distinctly the voice of a writer who has died, or to glimpse beyond it the work that might have been written. We All Lived in Bondi Then is a reminder of the loss Georgia Blain’s early death meant for readers, as well as those close to her. As acclaimed novelist Charlotte Wood writes in her introduction about the death of her friend, “my grief for Georgia was also about the terrible unfairness of losing her work, just when her talent was approaching its height”.'  (Introduction)

'Lucy Treloar’s third novel begins with two small girls playing together in a fenced kindergarten. They crush flowers into perfume and promise always to love each other. A man appears at the fence and, when he leaves, he takes one of the girls. The “outside-the-fence” girl turns and waves to the girl who remains, then skips ahead “into darkness”.' (Introduction)   

'The narrator of Angela O’Keeffe’s first novel, Night Blue (2021), wants to tell the reader their “inner story”. A story of being made, exhibited and judged, it is narrated by Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionist painting known as Number 11, 1952. Later named Blue Poles, the painting was purchased in 1973 by the National Gallery of Australia for $1.3 million. Because this sum was beyond the gallery director’s budget, it was controversially authorised by then prime minister Gough Whitlam.' (Introduction)    

'The accordion, or squeezebox, takes its name from the German Akkordeon, meaning a ‘musical chorus’ or ‘chorus of sounds’. This box-shaped aerophonic instrument makes music when keys on its sides are pressed, one side mostly melody, the other chords. Squeezing the instrument and playing with both hands, the musician dexterously produces polyphonous music.' (Introduction)