Cirrus@Austlit

'What happens when you take your 85-year-old mother to live with you on a Greek island? A strikingly original, funny, and forensic examination of love and finding home from the author of From Where I Fell

'In life, as in myth, women are the ones who are supposed to stay home like Penelope, weaving at their looms, rather than leaving home like Odysseus. Meet eighty-five-year-old Barbara and her sixty-two-year-old writer daughter Susan, who asked her mother—on a whim—if she wanted to accompany her to live on the Greek island of Kythera.

'What follows is a moving unravelling of the mother–daughter relationship told in poetic, irresistible prose.

'Aphrodite's Breath is a strikingly original, funny and forensic examination of love and finding home, amid the stories of the people, olives and wonders of the birthplace of Aphrodite.' (Publication summary) 

'An anguished email from Pamela Robinson in Australia to her ex-husband in Paris accidentally ends up in the inbox of New York State teacher Chrisanthi Woods. Chrisanthi is sympathetic to Pamela's struggles and the women begin to tell each other the stories and secrets of their lives.

'Pamela, responsible for raising her three sons, must re-invent the meaning of home following her divorce, and Chrisanthi, her dreams long dampened, must find home by leaving it. Temperamental opposites, their emails turn into an exhilarating and provocative exchange of love, loss and fresh beginnings, by turns amusing, frank and confronting.' (Publication summary)

 'There are many visits in Amy Witting’s first novel, published in 1977. At its centre is the mysterious visit to Bangoree of the celebrated Australian poet Roderick Fitzallan – but, this being a Witting novel set in a fictional town in small-minded rural Australia, a poet uncelebrated in Bangoree, where ‘a poet would be a vagrant, by definition’.'

'Jonathan Lott, recently divorced, is about to find how much love really matters in a funny, delightful and poignant novel that lays out the human condition - looking for love in all of its many forms with secrets, polite lies, desperation, compromise and joy.

Jonathan Lott is confused. His wife has left him for a woman and he doesn't like living alone. Is it true that an about-to-be-divorced man in possession of a good fortune is in need of a new wife? Would Penny Collins do, divorced herself, school teacher and frustrated artist? What about beautiful Anna, blown in from who knows where, trailing broken marriages behind her? There's a lot happening at The Landing, where Jonathan has his beach house, and he's about to find out how much love matters.' (Source: Publisher's website)