Cirrus@Austlit

'One clear evening in 1992 all the inhabitants enter the church hall, where they are locked in and burned alive. They have been persuaded to do this by a young man called Caleb Mean - also known as El Nino, the Christ Child. The only survivors of the fire are Caleb, his lover Virginia, and their baby daughter Golden. How could such a thing happen? And why? Do the answers lie in the tragedy of the Aborigines herded over the cliffs at Cape Grimm by white settlers? Are they in the history of Skye itself, founded by the unlikely survivors of a 19th-century shipwreck? Or do they lie within the mysteries of the human soul?' 

Source: ABE Books https://bit.ly/3gtVDeN

'Evelyn is a clever orphan at the Fountainbridge Institute for Destitute Girls. Enchanted by a cheerful lamplighter who fires the streetlamp outside her window each evening, she mesmerizes the other girls with flights of fancy. In a time before Freudian awareness of sexuality and the subconscious mind, such tales are forbidden by the institute's governor, who warns Evelyn to cease her nocturnal storytelling.

'Evelyn defies him - and is cast out of the orphanage and sacrificed to a shadowy figure claiming to be her long-lost father. Who is this man, and why does he lock Evelyn away in a hunting lodge?

'Years later, the mutilated body of a professor of ecclesiastical law turns up on one of Edinburgh's finest streets; the grave of a famous colonel is ravaged; a shady entrepreneur is slaughtered while dashing for a train; and a retired lighthouse keeper is ripped to shreds while walking his dog -- all this after Evelyn, now a young woman, has reappeared in the city.

'What connects the victims? And what of Evelyn, anguished and appealing, who repeatedly claims to have dreamed the murders in great detail - each time blaming a mysterious "lamplighter"?

'Leading the official investigation is Carus Groves, a conceited yet effective police inspector desperate to cap his unremarkable career with a sensational case. Heading up the unofficial investigation is a disillusioned professor of logic and metaphysics, Thomas McKnight, and his assistant, Joseph Canavan, a strapping young gravedigger. Using reason, intuition, philosophy, and luck, these men race to solve the murders and unveil the source of Evelyn's torment, and in so doing penetrate the very gates of Hell.'

Book Jacket. Scribner, 2003. (Libraries Australia record).

'Edited by Drusilla Modjeska, acclaimed author of the Orchard, Poppy and Exiles at Home, this famous anthology explores the sometimes joyous, sometimes vexed world of sisters, with stories and essays by six of Australia's finest writers comprising: Gillian Mears; Elizabeth Jolley; Helen Garner; Beth Yahp; Drusilla Modjeska; and Dorothy Hewett.'  (Publication summary)

'This beautiful fable-like story ranges from the rigid routines of the Imperial Dancers in pre-revolutionary Russia to exile in Australia at the outbreak of World War two. Russian-born Galina, who has danced for the tsar and for Diaghilev's famous ballet in Paris, operates a highly disciplined dance school - an outpost of Imperial Russia - in the dusty Adelaide of the 1940s and 1950s. From this humble base she goes on to form what becomes Australia's first professional ballet troupe. traveling the country it attracts a beautiful, talented young man. these two enact the story of the snow queen - the stern, beautiful woman who picks out a boy for herself, piercing his heart with a spike of ice, only to have her own pierced cruelly in return.' (Synopsis)

'In August 1948, 545 passengers boarded an overcrowded, clapped-out vessel in Marseilles to face an uncertain future in Australia and New Zealand. They came from displaced persons camps in Germany, death camps in Poland, labour camps in Hungary, gulags in Siberia and stony Aegean islands. There were those who had been hunted by the Nazis and those who had welcomed them; those who had followed the Communists and those who had fled them. Diane Armstrong set sail on the Derna with her parents when she was nine years old. Like a detective searching for clues, she has located over a hundred of the passengers. Through their recollections and memorabilia, as well as archival documents, she has recreated the voyage and traced what became of their hopes and dreams. The result is the unique portrayal of a migrant ship and its passengers.'  (Publication summary)

The rites of passage of two generations are enmeshed in this savagely black chronicle set in the grimy heat of small-town Tantanoula. Herald-Sun (10 August 2002).

In this story a teenage boy is set alight and burnt to death and his 14-year-old neighbour, Cheryl Jane Kiss, is determined to find out who killed him - just as soon as she stops binge-eating her way through the kitchen cupboard. The town they live in is Tantanoula and nothing is quite as it seems in this joint. Cheryl's mother has a few secrets of her own, if she ever sobers up long enough to remember them. Her stepfather, Jackson, meanwhile likes to leave dirty magazines under her mattress. The book deals with issues including depression, teen suicide, alcoholism and eating disorders, so when it's described as a black comedy, the word "black" is used advisedly. Brisbane News, (28 August 2002).

'Kathleen Lindley has honest brown hair, parted in the middle, because she finds symmetry soothing. Her mother, an overbearing woman, has hair like a steel trap. Kathleen's father, now long dead, was the receding type. Kathleen is well into adulthood before she finds the strength to escape her mother's clutches. She is thirty-two when she finally moves into a flat of her own, against her mother's will. But independence can bring loneliness, and her job managing the Curl Up'n'Dye hairdressing salon doesn't offer much opportunity for friendship. She and her mother are still tied together by the tragedy of her father, whose ghost is hard to dispel. Kathleen meets Jim, but her fragility and his carelessness make poor partners. When his attention starts to waver, she doesn't stop fate from providing its revenge. Clever and cut with black humour, Crowning Glory is about snarls, entanglements and letting down your hair.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.