Cirrus@Austlit

'No one is safe. The world has descended into chaos. On the surface, everything looks the same - yet the unthinkable has happened. The dead have risen...

'Everyone is haunted by a relative, friend, spouse or stranger and these spirits are unshakeable, silent and watching. Governments the world over fail to deal with the epidemic. Crime is rife and murders commonplace. But who is responsible: the ghosts or the people?

'Finding out is where Detective Oscar Mariani comes in, although it's nearly impossible to run a department when you can't even see half the suspects. His strike rate is embarrassingly low.

'Then he stumbles onto a case that cuts through his apathy. A ritualistic, brutal serial killer is at work murdering young women, and the evidence implicates those in high places. If Mariani can solve the case, and keep himself alive, he may be able to exorcise his own ghostly shadow, a dead young man who just might have a message Mariani needs to hear.

'A gripping mix of police procedural and supernatural thriller, The Broken Ones is a knuckle-whitening ride.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

"In the nineteenth century, Ireland lost half of its population to famine, emigration to the United States and Canada, and the forced transportation of convicts to Australia. The forebears of Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List, were victims of that tragedy, and in The Great Shame Keneally has written an astonishing, monumental work that tells the full story of the Irish diaspora with the narrative grip and flair of a great novel. Based on unique research among little-known sources, this masterly book surveys eighty years of Irish history through the eyes of political prisoners--including Keneally's ancestors--who left Ireland in chains and eventually found glory, in one form or another, in Australia and America.

We meet William Smith O'Brien, leader of an uprising at the height of the Irish Famine, who rose from solitary confinement in Australia to become the Mandela of his age; Thomas Francis Meagher, whose escape from Australian captivity led to a glittering American career as an orator, a Union general, and governor of Montana; John Mitchel, who became a Confederate newspaper reporter, gave two of his sons to the Southern cause, was imprisoned with Jefferson Davis--and returned to Ireland to become mayor of Tipperary; and John Boyle O'Reilly, who fled a life sentence in Australia to become one of nineteenth-century America's leading literary lights.

Through the lives of many such men and women--famous and obscure, some heroes and some fools (most a little of both), all of them stubborn, acutely sensitive, and devastatingly charming--we become immersed in the Irish experience and its astonishing history. From Ireland to Canada and the United States to the bush towns of Australia, we are plunged into stories of tragedy, survival, and triumph. All are vividly portrayed in Keneally's spellbinding prose, as he reveals the enormous influence the exiled Irish have had on the English-speaking world."

-Publisher's blurb.

'This dazzling debut novel tells the compelling story of a woman grappling with an event from her past as she searches for personal fulfillment and a sense of belonging. Growing up on the remote shores of Tasmania, Farley Willow experiences a childhood touched by magic. But as an adult, she must struggle with ghosts from her past.'(Publication summary)

From adolescent pen pal in the suburbs of Australia to prize-winning foreign correspondent, Geraldine Brooks presents an intimate and captivating memoir. Born on Bland Street in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longs to discover the vivid place where history happens and culture comes from. As a means of escaping the world around her, she enlists pen pals from around the globe who offer her a window on the hazards of adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. With the aid of her letters, Brooks turns her bedroom into the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, the barricades of Parisian student protests, the swampy fields of an embattled kibbutz.

Brooks goes from the protected environment of a Catholic girls school to the University of Sydney, eventually renting her own flat near the bustling Sydney harbor. She hires on as an intern at The Sydney Morning Herald and then wins a scholarship to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City, where she begins her career as a foreign correspondent. As a writer for The Wall Street Journal, Brooks reports on wars and famines in the Middle East, Bosnia, and Africa, but she never forgets her earlier foreign correspondence.

Back in Australia to attend her dying father, she stumbles on her old letters in her parents' basement, and embarks on a journey that tales her around the world on the most meaningful assignment of her career. Her search leads her through Israeli moshavim, Arab souks, medieval French hill towns, Martha's Vineyard fishing shacks, and Manhattan nightclubs. One by one, she finds men and women whose lives have been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of a mysterious and tragic mental illness.

It is only from the distance of foreign lands and against the background of alien lives that Brooks finally sees her homeland and her own life clearly. Candid, thoughtful, and compelling, Foreign Correspondence speaks to the unquiet heart of every girl who has ever yearned to become a woman of the world. (Publisher description)

'Last century Charles Darwin set out on a voyage in the Beagle that would change forever the way human history was viewed. It was on this voyage that Darwin collected the information that gave birth to his controversial Theory of Evolution.

'This is a novel of scientific discovery, of religious faith, of masters and servants, and of the endless wonder of the natural world. But its greatest triumph is Covington himself, the boy who looked up at the beckoning figure of a yellow-haired Christian in the stained glass window in his boyhood church of Bedford, and sought to follow.

'He leaves Bedford as a lad of 13 and goes to sea with the evangelical sailor John Phipps and becomes one of Phipps' 'lads'. But Phipps' catechising can't repress Covington's passage into manhood, nor prevent him chasing the exotic native maidens of Tierra del Fuego. When next he returns to sea it is to serve on the Beagle.

'Mr Darwin's Shooter re-creates the voyage of the Beagle, where Covington spends time exploring – and collecting specimens – inland. And we travel on to the Galapagos Islands, with their huge turtles and armadillos and remarkable finches. Years later, in Sydney's Watson's Bay in beset middle age, Covington awaits the arrival of the first copy of Darwin's The Origin of Species, which contains the scandalous theory of evolution. What part of his life might be in it? What truths may it contain? How can one man absorb the meaning of Creation?' (Publication summary)

'Three eccentric, secluded nuns live on a remote island, forgotten by time and the Church—until a priest unwittingly happens upon them. Father Ignatius is as surprised to see the nuns as they are to see a flesh-and-blood man, and what follows is the strange, moving, and often hilarious story of their struggle—a struggle of wills, and of faith.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Riverhead Books).

'Winner of the 1989 Christina Stead Fiction Prize, this novel tells the story of a woman living in Clapham surrounded by a menage consisting of her son, her lover, her ex-husband, an Alsatian and many others.'

'Two things happened to Rosemary that early summer;
she won $30,000 playing Keno at the Hakoah Club and
she fell in love with a woman much younger than herself.
Thus, laden with luck, she entered her fifty-first year. . . .

'When middle-aged, academic Rosemary meets twenty-seven-year-old Billie--a woman with a tough bike and an even tougher attitude--she goes weak at the knees. Yet when Billie speeds off on a soul-searching bender through the Australian outback, Rosemary is left to ponder love and longevity, and weather a few adventures of her own.
Cooped up for the summer with the eccentric Daphne--who is busy transforming her body into a tattooed biography of her mad mother's life--Rosemary unwittingly winds up with a leading role in a lesbian porn flick, loses her car to a shears-wielding murderer, and still finds time to compost her garden and miss Billie to no end. Yet as each woman's path twists through a hilarious comedy of manners and mishaps, one fact remains: relationships lie in the sometimes capable--sometimes careless--hands of coincidence.'  (Publication summary)