Cirrus@Austlit

"I haven't got a 'boyfriend', Mum." "Fine way to be carrying on then, out all Sat'dy night with a strange fella..." "Muuum. " "Don't you marm me, my girl. When I was your age I wasn't out running around with any stray bloke with a flash car and the gift of the gab. "And when I'm your age," thought Sue maliciously, "I won't be ringing up my kids to scab money and make their lives a misery into the bargain."

'Sue Wilson, young and Aboriginal, escapes her "too-large, too-poor family in a too-small" north Queensland town for Logan City's frontier sprawl. Entering "the mythic world of Work" she discovers that the view from behind the bar is less than glamorous, but pays the rent. When she meets Roger the good times begin to roll until she finds herself starring in a feature with medium level violence. Melissa Lucashenko's first novel makes no apologies. With direct and gutsy language, her characters live their lives in the shadows cast by indifferent affluence.'

(Source: UQP website: www.uqp.uq.edu.au)

'Cross My Heart is the story of a 17 year old girl from a country-family who runs away from home after deciding that she doesn’t want to marry her boyfriend as is expected of her just because she is pregnant (she was never asked about the marriage, he just asked her parents and it was excepted that she would accept the situation), and an ex-crim in his early twenties who has just got out of jail on good behaviour. Both looking for work. He offers her a lift on his bike to save her being picked up by a group of guys he knows is danger and they end up riding across half of Australia.' (Publication summary)

'Kelly is seventeen. She's a scholarship girl, her dad drinks too much and her mum lives in another city. Her house isn't renovated like those of her friends. But Kelly has one thing her friends are envious of – Phil. Rich, devoted, handsome Phil. And it looks like their future together is all mapped out.

'Then, on a hot afternoon in a dingy little pizza shop, Kelly meets Con. He's unlike anyone she's ever known before. It's a dramatic meeting, a chance encounter that changes everything . . .

'A passionate and uncompromising story of love, conflict and choices, from the author of Chain of Hearts and the highly acclaimed Queen Kat, Carmel and St Jude Get a Life.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.