Cirrus@Austlit

'In an already swamped city, a disastrous weather system looms, making the search to find a missing child urgent.

'A missing child.
A city on edge.
Time is running out...

'The world is in the grip of climate catastrophe. Sydney has been transformed by rising sea levels, soaring temperatures and rocketing social divide and unrest.

'When a small girl on the margins goes missing, Senior Detective Sadiya Azad is assigned to find her. She knows exactly what it is to be displaced, and swallowed by the landscape. A murder at the site of the child's disappearance suggests a connection and web of corruption, but fear keeps eyes turned and mouths closed.

'With few leads to go on and only days until a deadly storm strikes the city, Sadiya and offsider Detective Sergeant Paul Findlay find themselves locked in a race against time.
Chilling and utterly compelling, Landfall is crime writing at its best - and a terrifying vision of the future bearing down on us.' (Publication summary)

'Drawing on Stephen J. Pyne’s idea of the Pyrocene, James Bradley explores how this periodisation – the Age of Fire – reframes our relationship with an element that has become an uncontrollable force as well as a figure for our ecological fate.'

'In the opening pages of Kate Kruimink’s new novel, Heartsease, the narrator, Nelly Llewellyn, describes a weekend afternoon at Salamanca, in Hobart/nipaluna. “There is brine, coffee, red wine, whiskey, bread, soup, the yellow of old books, and an earthy array of sensible jumpers. Only the merest traces of attempted genocide in the air, the soil.” It’s a sketch that captures not just the sense of linguistic delight and playfulness that makes the book such a thoroughgoing pleasure but also the darkness and sense of loss that moves beneath them.' (Introduction)

'Catherine McKinnon’s last novel, the Miles Franklin-shortlisted Storyland, is one of the more striking Australian novels of recent years. Spanning almost a thousand years, from the 1700s to the 28th century, it powerfully captures the links between colonial destruction and ecological crisis and speaks to the violence inherent in trying to understand the human in separation from the natural world.' (Introduction)

(Introduction)

'Zoë Sadokierski’s Father, Son and Other Animals opens with a moment of disconnection, as she describes her father’s tendency to retreat into himself when they are together, disappearing into imaginary golf practice. ‘Sometimes when I’m talking to Dad, he’s not there. I look over and see that he’s gone.’ In keeping with the book’s broader interplay of humour and darker concerns, Sadokierski uses it as an excuse for a moment of black comedy. ‘When he’s like this, I could say anything,’ she continues. ‘Dad, I’m really struggling being a working parent. I’m drinking at breakfast.’ But, like the animal skull he later presents her, her father’s distraction prefigures the larger absence that will eventually overtake him, transforming the scene into a sort of memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of loss that shadows all life. And, no less importantly, it suggests a larger kind of extinction, one summoned up by the mute images of feathers and bones sketched alongside the words.' (Introduction)

'Melbourne author Myfanwy Jones’s last novel, the 2015 Miles Franklin-shortlisted Leap, was a deceptively complex creation. Emotionally acute and raw in its portrayal of guilt and grief, it was simultaneously oddly elliptical, with an almost allegorical dimension. Although her new novel, Cool Water, shares Leap’s light-footedness and crystal-clear prose, at least initially it feels more conventional. But as the novel proceeds it quickly becomes clear that it shares a very similar sensibility, and more than a little of Leap’s obliqueness and preparedness to take narrative risks.'(Introduction)

'In the opening pages of Charlotte Wood’s new novel, the narrator takes a detour to the cemetery outside the town where she grew up. She is there to visit her parents’ graves for the first time in 35 years, although that process is complicated by her difficulty locating them and by the discovery somebody left “ugly plastic flowers” by their headstones. As she walks away the narrator recalls the phone call she received to tell her that her mother’s headstone was ready, “my outsides unaltered but everything within me plummeting. Like a sandbank collapsing inside me.”' (Introduction)   

'On the Sunday before Sydney’s lockdown tightened for the second time, my partner and I drove to Coogee Beach. We were there to see the ocean one last time before our range of movement contracted to a mere five kilometres; a restriction that would cut us off from the coast. Cases that day were in the 400s, and rising, and both of us knew there was little chance we would be allowed back before October at the earliest.' (Introduction)

'Garth Nix chats with fellow author James Bradley about his enthralling new historical fantasy, The Left-Handed Booksellers of London. This is a live recording of an online event hosted via Zoom during the Covid-19 crisis.'  (Production summary)

'In the middle of last year, I visited Hobart. Officially, I was there to help run a writing workshop; unofficially, I was there for a gathering organised by a philanthropist with an interest in the environment. The guest list was eclectic – some scientists, an artist who has been creating work from ocean plastics and her partner, a writer or two – but there was no agenda, no expectation of resolutions or outcomes. Instead, seated in an old building in Hobart’s city centre, we talked about our work, the world, the future, searching out points of connection and intersection, discussing ways of expressing and managing the fears we were all, in our different ways, grappling with.' (Introduction)

'I try to make sense of her sudden absence but every hour, every minute, brings some new and usually terrifying development.'

'How do writers address climate catastrophe, and where do they place climate within their fictional narratives? Two writers, Anne Charnock and James Bradley, face up to this challenge in novels published in 2020. They compare notes about their different approaches in this exchange of emails.' (Introduction)