Cirrus@Austlit

'Your father. His head is a ghost trap. It's all he can do to open his mouth without letting them all howl out. Even so, you can still see them, sliding around the dark behind his eyes …

'It is New Year's Eve, 1990, and Ru's father has disappeared again. Haunted by the horrors of the Vietnam War, Jack has been an erratic – and at times violent – presence in his family's life. Meanwhile, Ru's sister, Lani, is constantly fighting with their mother, both suffocated by the small country town where they live. And then there's Les, Jack's brother, destined to be on the periphery, but harbouring his own desires.

'As each of the five reckons with the past, what emerges is an incandescent portrait of one family forever scarred by war. Tender, brutal, and heart-stopping in its beauty, A Loving, Faithful Animal is a hypnotic novel by one of Australia's brightest talents.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted pupil, Lucien. Unnervingly, her lover's wife has just published Murder at Black Swan Point, a true crime novel about the brutal slaying of a young adulteress. Suspecting the adult account of Black Swan Point's murder to be wrong, Kate imagines her own version of the novel, for children, narrated by Australian animals. But has her obsession with the crime aligned her fate with that of the murdered adulteress?

'Compelled by the lives of her nine-year-old students, Kate is a misfit among their parents. And though, in scenes of escalating eroticism, Lucien's father brings her to life sexually, he does nothing to penetrate her obsession with the past. Kate is fixated on the crime of passion that occurred years earlier, less and less aware of her own reputation in the present.' (Synopsis)