Cirrus@Austlit

'Life is pretty complicated for Elizabeth Clarry. Her best friend Celia keeps disappearing, her absent father suddenly reappears, and her communication with her mother consists entirely of wacky notes left on the fridge. On top of everything else, because her English teacher wants to rekindle the "Joy of the Envelope," a Complete and Utter Stranger knows more about Elizabeth than anyone else.

'But Elizabeth is on the verge of some major changes. She may lose her best friend, find a wonderful new friend, kiss the sexiest guy alive, and run in a marathon. So much can happen in the time it takes to write a letter... ' (Publication summary)

'Mel's life is chaotic. At school her ex-friends have ganged up on her, at home her parents have lost touch with her and each other. Pug is the only good thing - loving him, in his untidy room scented and shadowed by frangipani, she finds passionate fulfillment. But his world is so different from hers - can they possibly make it together? And can she let him in on her overwhelming secret? Learning to accept herself and him and the new life growing inside her is painful - but being Mel, she gives it everything she's got.' (Publication summary)

In 1902 Jeannie Gunn, a Melbourne schoolteacher, went with her new husband to live on the remote Elsey cattle station near the Roper River in the Northern Territory. Although she spent little more than a year there, her experiences in the outback and her contact with the local Aboriginal people impressed her deeply, and on her return to Melbourne she set down her recollections in two books, We of the Never Never and The Little Black Princess.

'Set in a Roman Catholic diocese,...Three Cheers for the Paraclete is about the dilemma of the rebel who knows that established authority is wrong but doesn't know how to put it right because he is himself too much a part of it. It is also about a critical religious issue...the conflict between a new generation which sees religious truth as something that must change with the world, and an establishment which sees it as fixed and immutable.

In the character of young Father Maitland, scholar and humanitarian, many readers will recognize a lost hero of our time. Others, perhaps, will see only an arrogant intellectual, and something of a heretic. But almost everyone will identify with one side or the other of the conflict into which Father Maitland's beliefs and sympathies draw him - a conflict with his superiors which threatens to destroy him both as a priest and as a man.' (Source: dustjacket, 1968 Angus and Robertson edition)