Cirrus@Austlit

'She must write her rage ... to win her war.

'Peak District, Mercia, AD 910: a young girl, Freda works hard to avoid her father's temper, while longing for his approval. She loves foraging in the woods and hearthside stories of heroes. Secretly she thinks in poetry and dreams of one day being able to write; her quills are grass stalks and sticks, her parchment the sky, the earth, her skin. But Freda's world is at war, and when her village is decimated in a savage raid and her father goes missing, Freda must find the strength to survive.

'Taken in by the church, her only options are a life of servitude or prayer. But the cunning bishop sees an opportunity. As well as teaching Freda to write, he uses her survival as evidence of a miracle so as to attract pilgrims who bring wealth. As Freda chafes against the bishop's increasing control, she develops a friendship with the Mercian leader Ethelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, who shows her what it is to lead as a woman in a world that worships warrior kings.

'Soon Freda must choose. Does she remain the powerless, subservient quill whose fate lies in the hands of another, or does she fight for the right to create - and write - her own story?'  (Publication summary)

'Once upon a time, a young girl ventured into a dark forest, looking for a cure for her much-loved elder sister ... A touching, tender and lyrical fable about what we do for the ones we love, and the beauty and mystery of being alive in a world in which we are part of everything, and everything is part of us.

'As a terrible pandemic rages through the country, a young girl, Teo, leaves her small village and sets off into the forest, in search of a cure for her sister who is infected with the pox. Her father Merdocai has surrendered himself to the evil Marquis to be experimented upon for the Greater Good; and with her mother long-dead, all Teo has to keep her going is the love of her sister, her father and her friend Rodrigo, a stuttering poet.

'As Teo ventures deeper into the forest, she encounters creatures and teachers who hold the answers to all the questions she has about who she is, and where she has come from. Meanwhile, out in the depths of the ocean, a whale is returning to the place he was born, to exhale his last breath. While Teo does not know this, he too holds secrets that belong to Teo's story.

'The Whale's Last Song is a tender, sweet and wise fable, on what we are prepared to do for those we love; a celebration of the beauty and mystery of being alive in a world in which we are part of everything, and everything is part of us; and a love song to the natural world. It is The Alchemist meets The Princess Bride meets The Little Prince. It is a little gem.' (Publication summary)

'An explosive, contemporary literary thriller from international bestselling author Nikki Gemmell - Wing is Lord of the Flies meets Picnic at Hanging Rock meets Promising Young Woman.

'Students from an elite girls' school go on a camping trip into the Australian bush. Four of them - a girl gang, a group of best friends dubbed 'The Cins' by the teachers - become separated from the main group. A male teacher volunteers to look for them.

'None of the five come back.

'A major search immediately gets underway. Days crawl past, agonisingly, with no sign of the girls or their teacher. The principal of the school, godmother to one of the missing students, is desperately trying to hold the parents, the school community - and herself - together. She needs to find out what happened before the police do. Finally, separated and traumatised, the four girls re-appear. But the male teacher does not.

'And The Cins aren't talking.

'Wing is an immersive, propulsive, headlong, heartrush of a read. Provocative, sharp, raging and tender, it is a novel about the fault lines in female friendships. Between mothers and daughters. Between older and younger generations. And of course, between men and women. It is a novel that meets its times head on, with great power, honesty and urgency. As the author of the international sensation, The Bride Stripped Bare, Nikki Gemmell defined sex, desire and identity for a generation of women. Now, two decades later, she comes full circle, with another incendiary novel about what it means to be a woman today.'  (Publication summary)

'From multi-award-winning author Jock Serong comes Cherrywood, an imaginative, darkly playful and deeply meaningful delight, a novel about legacy, community, wonder, love and reinvention.

''One rainy Friday evening in the winter of 1993, a taxi swept through the streets of East Melbourne, on its way from the city to Richmond. That year was one of the few remaining when a great deal was known of the world but not yet so much that the world had become over-known. Small gaps remained ...'

'Edinburgh, 1916: A rich Scottish industrialist, Thomas Wrenfether, impulsively embarks on a mad scheme to build a paddlesteamer out of dubiously sourced European cherrywood on the other side of the world, in booming Melbourne, Australia. But nothing goes according to plan.

'Melbourne, 1993: Martha is a clever, lonely and frustrated lawyer. One night, on impulse, she stops at a strange pub in Fitzroy, The Cherrywood, for a bottle of wine. The mysterious building and its inhabitants make an indelible impression, and she slowly begins to deduce odd truths about the pub.

'From multi-award-winning author Jock Serong comes a darkly delicious, playful and rich novel about legacy, community, wonder, love and reinvention - Cherrywood is haunting, magical and a true original.' (Publication summary)

'From multi-award-winning writer Helen Ennis comes the first ever biography of the photographer Max Dupain, the most influential Australian photographer of the 20th century and creator of many iconic images that have passed into our national imagination.

'Max Dupain (1911-1992) was a major cultural figure in Australia who was at the forefront of the visual arts in a career spanning more than fifty years. During this time he produced a number of images now regarded as iconic (The Sunbaker, Meat Queue, Form at Bondi, At Newport). He championed modern photography and a distinctive Australian approach.

'However, to date Dupain has been seen mostly in one-dimensional, limited and limiting terms - as exceptional, as super masculine, as an Australian hero. But this landmark biography approaches him as a complex and contradictory figure who, despite the apparent certitude of his photographic style, was filled with self-doubt and anxiety. Dupain was a Romantic and a rationalist and struggled with the intensity of his emotions and reactions. He wanted simplicity in his art and life but found it difficult to attain. He never wanted to be ordinary.

'Examining the sources of his creativity - literature, art, music - alongside his approach to masculinity, love, the body, war, and nature, Max Dupain: A Portrait reveals a driven artist, one whose relationship to his work has been described as 'ferocious' and 'painful to watch'. Photographer David Moore, a long-term friend, said he 'needed to photograph like he needed to breathe. It was part of him. It gave his drive and force in life.''  (Publication summary)

'From critically acclaimed author, Mark Mordue, comes a poetic, compressed and powerfully beautiful novel, which will work its way under your skin.

'A sunny, bright, cold Christmas morning. Two young girls go ice-skating on a frozen pond and tragically drown. Lives are lost, and lives are irrevocably changed.

'Three years later, on Christmas Eve, Darcy Travers, the father of one of the girls, is struggling with the anniversary, as he does each year, battling with his inability to accept the loss of his daughter. Sometimes, he feels, she's still there, ghost-like, just on the edge of his vision, watching over him. Zel, his ex-wife, is similarly bereft. Like Darcy she is consumed by grief and rage, as the pair blame each other. They are bonded in their suffering with their neighbours, Pete and Suda Kelly, the parents of the other girl who drowned.

'As snowy winter weather sets in around the town of Thule, and night closes in on Christmas Eve, a series of unexpected events propels the lives of these people together once more.

'From critically acclaimed writer Mark Mordue comes a darkly beautiful novel about grief and love, and how they are inextricably intertwined. How does a parent endure the loss of a much-loved child? What happens to someone suffering that kind of grief? And how might Christmas feel in the years to come if you had a lost child to put to rest in your soul? Both a love story and ghost story, There's No Telling is about grief, loss, shame and redemption - and how we can work our way back from the very worst thing that can happen to us.' (Publication summary)

'From the author of the Miles Franklin Award shortlisted Storyland, comes a rich, layered and thrilling novel of love, war and friendship, To Sing of War.

'December 1944: In New Guinea, a young Australian nurse, Lotte Wyld, chances upon her first love, Virgil Nicholson, there to fight the Japanese and keen to prove his worth as a man. Against the backdrop of a hard-fought jungle campaign, the two negotiate their troubled past. Meanwhile, in Los Alamos, young physicists Miriam Carver and Fred Johnson join Robert Oppenheimer and a team of brilliant scientists in a collective dream to build a weapon that will stop all war, with Oppenheimer also juggling the competing demands of the American military and his clever wife, Kitty. Far away, on the sacred island of Miyajima, Hiroko Narushima helps her husband's grandmother run a ryokan, however, when one of her daughters encounters danger, Hiroko must act to ensure her family's safety.

'Each of these people yearns to belong, yet each fiercely protects their independence. Secrets, misunderstandings and fears burden them, shame shapes them, hope and imagination lift them up. They are caught in a moment of history, both enthralled and appalled by actions they must undertake. The novel asks what we can learn from this time, when a weapon of mass destruction changed the nature of war and made irreversible changes to our planet. How does fear shape our behaviour, affect our moral being? What is unforgiveable, in love and war, and what must be forgiven? How can one person make a difference in a world that is wondrous, thrilling and endangered?

'From Miles Franklin-shortlisted author, Catherine McKinnon, comes a beautiful, rich and intricately woven novel of conflict, death, sacrifice and forgiveness, a novel that insists on our interconnectedness and hums with the energy of the world, a blazingly powerful and deeply moving account of friendship, love and war.' (Publication summary)

'Who killed Martin Friedrich? From award-winning writer Steven Carroll comes the first book in a series of post-war literary crime novels featuring Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter, with shades of The Third Man and Brighton Rock.

'Cambridge, UK, 1947.

'Martin Friedrich, a German philosopher who is in Cambridge to give a series of lectures, is cycling through an intersection on his way to give a lecture when a speeding car runs through him and kills him. A grisly death for one of the finest minds of the age.

'Shortly afterwards, Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter, an Austrian-born, cockney Jew, whose parents were interned during the war as enemy aliens, stands over the body of Friedrich contemplating the age-old question - who did it? Because Friedrich might be one of the finest minds of his age, but he's also problematic. A brilliant philosopher whose lectures attracted students from all over Europe before the war and is regarded as the founder of modern existentialism, Friedrich was also, in the 1930s, a member of the Nazi Party. As Stephen is soon to discover, there is no shortage of suspects. Friedrich -arrogant, a womaniser dedicated solely to his own work over anything or anybody else - was hated by almost everybody, even those who loved him.

'Is there any sense to his death - a logic to the sequence of events that led to it - or was his death just a case of rotten, random luck? Has the universe spoken, and, in this sense, should Friedrich be pleased with the nature of his death as it is, after all, confirmation of his life's observations on our indifferent, random universe? Or are there more sinister factors at work?

'From one of Australia's finest, critically-acclaimed writers, The Death of an Existentialist is a playful mixture of detective story, farce and literary fiction that examines the quite serious question of how to live a meaningful life in an indifferent, random, post-god world.' (Publication summary)

'On a steamy, hot day in January 1788, seven Aboriginal men, representing the nearby clans, gather at Warrane. Several newly arrived ships have been sighted in the great bay to the south, Kamay. The men meet to discuss their response to these visitors. All day, they talk, argue, debate. Where are the visitors from? What do they want? Might they just warra warra wai back to where they came from? Should they be welcomed? Or should they be made to leave? The decision of the men must be unanimous -- and will have far-reaching implications for all. Throughout the day, the weather is strange, with mammatus clouds, unbearable heat and a pending thunderstorm ... Somewhere, trouble is brewing.

'From award-winning author and playwright Jane Harrison, The Visitors is an audacious, earthy, funny, gritty and powerful re-imagining of a crucial moment in Australia's history - and an unputdownable work of fiction.' (Publication summary)

'In Judea, under the brutal rule of King Herod, a woman yearns for a child but is outcast when she does not fall pregnant. Against all convention, she masters the art of glassblowing, a creative act she believes will keep her dream of motherhood alive.

'In Renaissance Florence, a young wife is left penniless by her hopelessly unfaithful husband, and struggles to find a way to support herself and her young son.

'And in contemporary Australia, a talented textile conservator, devastated by loss, is desperate to regain control of her life. Each woman wants something that seems unattainable, and it will take all their courage, creativity and determination to achieve it.'

Source: Publisher's blurb

'Margaret Bryce, deceased mother of twins, has been having a hard time since dying in 2014. These days she spends time with her daughters – Eva in Madrid, and Rachel and her family in Melbourne – and her estranged husband, Henry, in Aberdeen. Mostly she enjoys the experience of revisiting the past, but she's tiring of the seemingly random events to which she repeatedly bears witness. There must be something more to life, she thinks. And death.

'Spanning more than seventy-five years, from 1945 to 2021, A Country of Eternal Light follows Margaret as she flits from wartime Germany to Thatcher's Britain to modern-day Scotland, Australia and Spain, ruminating on everything from the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster and Australia's Black Summer bushfires to Mary Queen of Scots' beheading, the death of Princess Diana and in-vitro fertilisation. But why is facing up to what's happened in one's past as hard as, if not harder than, blocking it out completely? A poignant, utterly original and bitingly funny novel about complicated grief and how we remain wanted by our loved ones, dead or alive.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The majority of men sexually abused as children never speak about their past and hide their shame and trauma away, forever carrying an enormous burden on their own, often with terrible consequences. From the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Fourteen, You Made Me This Way is part memoir, part investigation, driven by Shannon's experience of having been sexually abused as a young child.

'A harrowing and heartbreaking yet ultimately hopeful book about one of our society's deepest shames, from Shannon Molloy, the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Fourteen.' (Publication summary)

'I can catalogue Antarctica by touch. The touch of air sucked dry on my cheek, the fur of a day-old seal pup, the touch of an iceberg, a blizzard, a lover, the touch of sweat at minus twenty-three, of a camera stuck to the skin on my face, of cold like glass cutting into my skin, of a snowflake, of a dead man, of a doctor's fingers on my inner thigh, of a tongue on my eye.

'Shiver tells the story of Fin, a young woman who gets the chance of a lifetime to go to Antarctica. Surrounded by the cruel beauty of the last great wilderness on earth, she finds herself transfixed by the power of the land. Travelling and living with a close-knit and idiosyncratic team, Fin learns the rules and taboos of community life in Antarctica, and then promptly breaks the strictest taboo of all - she falls in love. The consequences are shattering.

'Lyrical, haunting and sometimes painfully moving, Shiver is a first novel of great power and beauty.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Miracles are notoriously unreliable. But sometimes, just when they're needed, they turn up - although not always in the form that we expect...

''A novel luminous with love and hope that will change the way you see the world.' Kathryn Heyman

'Awkward, hapless Marick is still struggling with the loss of his wife, his child and his faith when he is reluctantly thrust into the position of chaplain at a large public hospital. Shortly after arriving, he meets Hugo, a hospital scientist and a man almost as lost as Marick himself, who is working in a forgotten lab, deep in the subterranean realms of the hospital. Hugo is convinced that the bacteria he uses for protein production have - unbelievably - begun to produce gold. Is it alchemy, evolution, a hoax or even ... possibly ... a miracle?

'In the meantime, Christmas is approaching, the number of homeless outside the hospital is increasing, the Director of Operational Services is pressing Marick about his weekly KPIs, you can't buy chocolate in the hospital shop anymore, and Marick keeps waking with nightmares at 4 am every night. If ever a miracle was needed, it's now.

'A tender, sweet, sad, gritty, slyly funny and unexpectedly uplifting novel about family, friendship, faith, love - and alchemy - Tiny Uncertain Miracles is a hopeful and luminous gift to all readers.'  (Publication summary)

'1850: A sea-chest full of books arrives for Antonio Mateus Carvalho Cabral, the younger son of a family of whalers on the small volcanic island of Pico ...

'The Carvalho brothers - handsome Marcelinho and clever Antonio - are destined to spend their lives hunting whales. But the arrival of an unexpected gift changes both their lives forever. As the younger Carvalho discovers the fascinating world of the whale, a chasm opens between the two brothers, made all the more perilous by their shared passion for the alluring and wilful Margarida Machado.

'From the Azores to Lisbon, from Newfoundland to Australia, our hero travels in search of love, fortune and his very soul. It is in Eden, a small whaling port on the south coast of New South Wales, that he finally finds salvation in the shape of Alice Binney, fellow lost soul and impostor, in flight from her dark past. An enduring bond forms between the two, culminating in a final, dazzling act of atonement.

'Gloriously dark, delightful, witty and moving, Mr Carver's Whale is a novel of our many crimes against nature and the human heart, and the price we have to pay for our sins. But can love ever really be a crime?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A beautiful novel from multi-award-winning writer Kristel Thornell, The Sirens Sing is about the haunting force of love and desire that ricochets between lives, across generations and through time. It is a portrait of Australian longing.

'The Blue Mountains, mid-1990s. Heather and David are two young people on the brink of adulthood, drawn together by their study of Italian. David is smitten with Heather, but has no idea how she feels about him. Besides Italian in common, they are both children of struggling single mothers, who raised them in the grungy Inner West of Sydney - share houses, a squat, a Housing Commission flat - before moving to Blackheath. At a festive evening to celebrate Heather's final high-school exam, events take a course that will profoundly change the lives of everyone present.

'Sydney, mid-1970s. Jan, the unconfident daughter of working-class parents and the first in her family to go to university, strikes up a friendship with bohemian, assured Alicia. They quickly become close. But one night down by Blackwattle Bay - the night of Gough Whitlam's dismissal - things go awry.

'A tender and poignant novel from award-winning writer Kristel Thornell, The Sirens Sing is a portrait of Australian longing. It explores desire, how it haunts and shapes us, and how, from generation to generation, there are echoes, overlaps and intersections in how we love, who we love, and why we love, as we are compelled to repeat the same patterns over and over again, like moths to a flame.' (Publication summary)

From award-winning writer and journalist Felicity McLean comes Red, a spirited and striking contemporary retelling of the Ned Kelly story

It's the early 1990s and Ruby 'Red' McCoy dreams about one day leaving her weatherboard house on the Central Coast of New South Wales, where her best friend, Stevie, is loose with the truth, and her dad, Sid, is always on the wrong side of the law. But wild, whip-smart Red can't stay out of trouble to save her life, and Sid's latest hustle is more harebrained than usual. Meanwhile, Sergeant Trevor Healy seems to have a vendetta against every generation of the McCoys.

Told in Ruby's vivid, inimitable voice, Red is part True Grit, part Blue Murder. It's a story of police persecution. Of dodgy deals and even dodgier cars. And of a family history that refuses to stay in the past. A sharp, provocative and savagely funny novel. (Publication summary)

'What if your first love was your one and only chance at happiness? In our lives, some promises are easily forgotten, while others come to haunt us with tragic results. From the bestselling author of The Girl on the Page comes The Lessons, a compelling novel about love and betrayal.

'1962: When teens Daisy and Harry meet, it feels so right they promise to love each other forever, but in 1960s England everything is stacked against them: class, education, expectations. When Daisy is sent by her parents to live with her glamorous, bohemian Aunt Jane, a novelist working on her second book, she is confronted by adult truths and suffers a loss of innocence that flings her far from the one good thing in her life, Harry.

'1983: Jane Curtis, now a famous novelist, is at a prestigious book event in New York, being interviewed about her life and work, including a novel about the painful and disastrous coming of age of a young woman. But she won't answer the interviewer's probing questions. What is she trying to hide?

'This is a novel about the painful lessons life has to teach us, about ourselves, about love, honesty and morality. Echoing novels like Persuasion, A Room with a View and the memoir An Education, The Lessons is a striking and powerful story about the loss of innocence and betrayal and how much we can forgive - if we forgive.' (Publication summary) 

'From one of our finest writers - winner of the Miles Franklin, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Prime Minister's Literary Award - comes a wistful and emotional story that imagines a happier ending for the mercurial and complicated Vivienne Haigh-Wood, first wife of the great poet, TS Eliot.

'London, June 1940. With help from friends, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the wife of celebrated poet TS Eliot, is about to effect a daring escape from Northumberland House, the private insane asylum where she has been held for the past four years. Her family, and most particularly her husband, think she's insane - and maybe she has been, in the past, Vivienne thinks, mad with love, that is, but she is starting to finally feel like herself again.

'There is an old law, Vivienne has been told, that if a person can break out of an asylum and stay free for thirty days, proving they can look after themselves, they can't make you go back. But closing in on Vivienne is the young Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter, a man with a hidden past of his own, who has orders to track her down...

'With Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight, Steven Carroll completes his critically acclaimed, award-winning and much-loved Eliot Quartet. This novel is a poignant, deeply felt and intensely moving novel of beginnings, endings and reinvention, about the aftermath of a marriage and the reassembling of a broken woman. A delicate dance between what was and what might have been, between fact and fiction, the novel tells a daringly revisionary story of Vivienne - TS Eliot's first wife, the 'mad woman in the attic' - imagining a wholly different and entirely satisfying ending to her story.' (Publication summary)

'Beijing, 1984, and young proofreader Ding is in all kinds of trouble ... A sharp, funny novel about one of the most turbulent, and most hopeful, periods of China's recent history.' (Publication summary)