Cirrus@Austlit

This Is How tells the story of Patrick Oxtoby, an outsider longing to fit in. When his fiancé Sarah breaks off their engagement, Patrick leaves home and moves to a boarding house in a seaside village a few hours away. In spite of his hopes for a new and better life, Patrick struggles to make friends or make the right impression. He can't shake the feeling that his new acquaintances are conspiring against him, further fracturing his fragile personality and prompting him to take a course of action that alters the course of his life. (Publisher's blurb)

'John Egan is a misfit — "a twelve year old in the body of a grown man with the voice of a giant" — who diligently keeps a "log of lies." John's been able to detect lies for as long as he can remember, it's a source of power but also great consternation for a boy so young. With an obsession for the Guinness Book of Records, a keenly inquisitive mind, and a kind of faith, John remains hopeful despite the unfavorable cards life deals him.

'This is one year in a boy's life. On the cusp of adolescence, from his changing voice and body, through to his parents’ difficult travails and the near collapse of his sanity, John is like a tuning fork sensitive to the vibrations within himself and the trouble that this creates for he and his family.

'Carry Me Down is a restrained, emotionally taut, and sometimes outrageously funny portrait whose drama drives toward, but narrowly averts, an unthinkable disaster.' (Publication summary)

'Lou Connor, a precocious, gifted, and unhappy sixteen-year-old, is offered a place as an exchange student in the United States, something that she hopes will take her far away from her bleak life of poverty in Sydney, Australia. Having endured a childhood with an emotionally crass, deadbeat family, she welcomes the opportunity to live the middle-class life she has long dreamed of. But soon after she moves in with her host family, the Hardings - who live in a prefabricated mansion in a nameless Chicago suburb - Lou's acute need for acceptance and love runs up against the Hardings' suffocating pursuit of a particular form of suburban perfection. How the Light Gets In is a portrait of a girl on the verge of adulthood whose world - like Holden Caulfield's before her - is full of mixed messages.' (Synopsis)