Cirrus@Austlit

‘If I held my whole kingdom in one hand and my son in the other, I would toss them both to the bottom of the sea before I would let them impede me.’

'Sixteenth-century Princess Jeanne d’Albret is twice royal: her uncle is King of France, her father King of Navarre. She is small, she is often ill – yet she won’t allow that to define her. As a child, she is carried to the altar at the French King’s command – but she and her mother have a secret plan to get their own way...

'Soon a new king is on the French throne. And when a second arranged marriage is forced on her, Jeanne is surprised by bliss. She can’t stop talking or thinking about Antoine, first prince of the blood; she throws her whole self into their life together, even when the battlefield parts them.

'Fiery and stubborn, wherever she goes, Jeanne is reminded of her famous poet-mother, protector of reformers, who could not break with the Catholic church despite her attraction to the new religious ideas. Jeanne resolves to go further – and let nothing stop her. But what will this mean for her precious marriage? As the Civil Wars break out – the Wars of Religion – and Jeanne commits to the Huguenots, will her adored husband take the same path? How can she fend off the Pope, the Guises – and the wily, evasive Queen Mother of France, Catherine de Médicis, while struggling for her son’s rights and future?

'Tracy Ryan’s second novel in the Queens of Navarre trilogy is a story of both flesh and spirit, of passion and obsession, and their often devastating consequences for self and others.' (Publication summary)

'You burn your bridges
going into a foreign forest
Dorothy Porter

'Three people form an unlikely but spirited connection.
Adrian is a renowned scholar, an expert on death in the modern age whose life has stalled.

'Kezi, a young and passionate artist, has been rejected by her family. She hurtles through her days with defiance and regret.

'Laura is a successful town planner submerged in a seemingly perfect marriage.

'In The Buried Life Andrea Goldsmith brilliantly dissects the conflicts and complexities of contemporary life in a story of love and friendship, faith and fundamentalism, subtly underscored by the power of poetry and music.'  (Publication summary)

'In this deeply intimate and strikingly beautiful poetry collection, twice-shortlisted Miles Franklin Award author Gregory Day celebrates the ongoing wonders of the earth and sea while calling time on the superficial divisions we have created between ideas of nature and culture.

'Southsightedness offers a way of being as well as seeing. It details a very direct and local world but one made universal by the poet’s art. This is a world of reality and the imagination, a world of damaged and regenerating ecologies, where the poet lives surrounded by family, animals, weather, sport, tourism, and the layers of history.

'With lyrical craft and inventive power, Southsightedness offers deep aesthetic pleasure but in an often-down-to-earth way. In part a survey of the past as well as a navigational guide for the future, it is a vivid poetic catalogue of a 21st century cultural landscape, where all things are interconnected, including sound and sense, beauty and humour, truth and joy.'  (Publication summary)

'Ambrose and Ursula, both librarians, strive to have a baby in a world where children seem less prevalent. Their story becomes increasingly punctuated by seemingly random episodes of violence inflicted upon their world as Bottrel, a fascist leader, preys on the insecurities of a populace saturated with information and the act of remembering. He attempts to master the past, viewing it as a source of corruption. He persecutes librarians and begins to selectively cull collections.

'Ambrose and Ursula attempt to remain outside this conflict, but inevitably are drawn into it, through their desire to save the books they have spent their working lives preserving. They realise that they must save the past for a new generation to be able to understand it.

'Narrative and character-driven, this is a startlingly original novel that passionately opposes the trend for banning books and the attempts to rewrite history. Set in a slightly future world that has managed the climate crisis but with a dramatic decrease in population, Saturation feels eerily like now. As we constantly forget names and passwords, and lean into a tyranny of reductivism, it calls us to a position of knowledge and hope.' (Publication summary)

'In the year 2000, an Australian woman travels to the Hague to work as the secretary for an Australian judge. There, she sits through the trial of a former military man who has been charged with war crimes. As the trial proceeds, she is confronted with two conflicting impulses: being deeply affected by the testimony of witnesses, while at the same time plagued by an enduring doubt as to the defendant’s guilt.

'Meanwhile, she begins an unexpected romance and friendship, and these relationships help her to understand the stories of extraordinary survival she hears about during the trial. When she is called back to Australia to reckon with her own childhood, she finds she can’t quite leave everything she’s heard behind. Out of the Woods asks what it means to bear witness to the suffering of people who have experienced real tragedy and whether it is possible, afterwards, to resume a normal life.'  (Publication summary)

'Forty-year-old Alice Kaczmarek has lost so much. She wants a baby, but her husband Daniel is serving a life sentence, accused of orchestrating an accident on Sydney’s new transport system. When T, the subject of medical experimentation, crawls up the front steps of her house, Alice learns of a strange connection between T and Daniel.

'In this psychological novel of threat and intrigue, it seems everyone is involved in a scam, even a respected surgeon colleague. After she is followed, and her home invaded, Alice no longer knows who to rely on and must navigate this corrupt, murky world alone. In the process, she draws ever closer to Daniel’s friend, Lowell.

'After the Great Storm is a novel imbued with both darkness and light, sadness and joy; its characters refuse to give up on love regardless of the cost. Ultimately it asks an urgent question for our times. When corruption becomes endemic how can we save our own moral code?'  (Publication summary)

'After living in a Singapore dog shelter for five years, Gucci – a vaguely Dalmatian-like crossbred – is losing hope of ever being rescued. One day to his surprise he is adopted by her, a writer, and moves to inner city Sydney. On arrival, however, an anti-dog war breaks out in their apartment block; Gucci’s owner receives a letter threatening the possibility of ‘euthanasia’. The incident triggers nightmares in her and brings back distressing childhood memories.

'My Name Is Gucci is a charming novel about the relationships between pets and their owners and about how the past shapes the present. This bold ex-shelter dog narrated fable beautifully unravels Gucci’s and his adopter /guardian’s secrets, which have been intertwined for decades through their recurring reincarnations.

'Sun Jung understands the deep connections that exist between animals and humans. You won’t need to be a dog lover to be entranced by this story; it is brimming with warmth, wit and wisdom.' (Publication summary)

'Set between the wars, A Cold Season is rich in voice, character and landscape.

'It follows the story of fourteen-year-old Beth, who is also the narrator. Beth’s brother Sam and her father Owens have gone missing in a freak winter storm. In a small house in the foothills of Mount Kosciusko, Beth is stuck with her mother and her other brother, Little Sasha. They are waiting and longing for Sam and Owens to return. In what threatens to become an emotional and physical pressure cooker tensions flare, and to make matters worse Mama is seeing the local bad man, Wallace.

'Matthew Hooper’s stunning debut expresses how people deal differently with absence and hope. It is a story of finding agency in a world where people, and particularly the young, are often powerless. As Beth plays with language to reclaim her spirit and family, A Cold Season emerges as unforgettable – a novel that captures rural poverty and human capacity with true soul.' (Publication summary)

'Lyrical and atmospheric. As the influence of the West falls away, an unnamed narrator drifts through the East’s floating world of non-places – chain hotels, airports, mega-cities – finalising often covert operations and deals. When he meets the enigmatic and beautiful Tien, a 21st-century floating world courtesan, he becomes involved with people and events that threaten his plan to escape life via various forms of oblivion.

'Evocative and sparely written, in the tradition of The Mary Smokes Boys, this is a novel where the journey becomes the story, filled with acute observation, desire and dreams.' (Publication summary)

'Mural is a haunting ‘confession’ by a psychopath known only as D. Held in a secure facility, he has been asked by his psychiatrist to write down his thoughts, admissions, anxieties and uncertainties. They are at first revealed through the stories of other people’s lives and obsessions.

'Specifically, D is preoccupied with a British man who spent his early years as a schoolteacher in Australia before becoming a renowned sexologist. D is also consumed by Australia’s most prolific public artist, a man whose highly erotic watercolours are at odds with his stained-glass church windows. D writes of his meeting with a boyhood friend. He recounts the true tale of a Frenchman who went mad because he believed prehistoric stones in Brittany were shifting.

'Downes navigates the real and the imagined, traversing fact and fiction. Mural is daring, acknowledging the influences of European writers such as Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald while moving into new and original territory. It is both provocative and tender, a highly explosive fable about sexuality, religion, art and obsession.' (Publication summary)

'Shifts in tone, setting and narration create a sense of the uncanny in Beam of Light, Kinsella’s haunting collection of stories.

'A man is disturbed by the sight of a familiar dining table and chairs atop an impending bonfire of bulldozed trees, a girl finds a fox skeleton and feels compelled to protect its spirit by dispersing its bones over the valley, a couple are invited to dinner by Christians new to town –an occasion that quickly turns heavy and strange, two men awkwardly meet again when their daughters attend the same ballet class, and a man and woman struggle to balance the threats of addiction and poverty with the joys and hopes of a new baby.

'Stories range in location from Ireland to Germany to Greece to the Australian countryside – threatened by catastrophic heat, land clearing, housing estates and strip malls – and Kinsella’s characters, so often on the edge, sear the consciousness.' (Publication summary)

'Set between the Blue Mountains and a Sydney hospital, Lisa Kenway’s All You Took from Me is a thriller brimming with great characters and nail-biting tension.

'Anaesthetist Clare Carpenter has just lost her husband and her memory in a single-vehicle accident. So why is a stranger following her? After questioning patients about their dreams, she becomes convinced that an anaesthetic drug might help her access missing memories. But there’s no way to be certain without jeopardising her career or her life.

'As unexplained threats escalate, Clare realises she must take matters into her own hands to learn the uncomfortable truth about her secretive husband, his connection to a mysterious club and what she did to trigger a stranger’s crusade for vengeance. But how far will she go?' (Publication summary)

'‘He looked down at his watch and saw that the long hand was overlapping the short, pointing towards twelve. The old year had passed and the new year had begun. He was swept by a feeling of loss and attachment to a past that was no longer there: If I were in China now, I would be …’

'A father and son muse on the value of fame and fortune and the path of chu jia or receding from the world by becoming a monk. On Christmas Eve a lonely immigrant travels from his deserted outer suburb to the city in search of life. Spouses navigate their adult son’s need to ‘rebrand’ himself with an English name. Between Shanghai and Montreal, a Chinese student and a Canadian man who has fallen in love with him exchange correspondence. Haunted by the sounds of piano and violin and the long-lost friend who returns only to him in dreams a man confronts the past. Can we ever really trust a car salesperson or those friends who say we must catch up soon but never do?

'Ouyang Yu’s first collection of stories in English is both assured and tender and at times surprisingly funny. It includes stories set in China and Australia that revel in the truth and candour of lived experience and the joys and constraints of language. In The White Cockatoo Flowers Ouyang Yu deftly peels back the layers on what it means to move from one culture to another, and what it means to be a writer, a husband, a parent and a stranger on foreign and familiar ground.'  (Publication summary)

'An exhilarating and unforgettable love song for our world.

'Heartbroken and in fear for his life, corporate whistle blower, Jagger Eckerman, escapes to hide out in a remote cave, but kick-arse radical, Nia Moretti, is furious a ‘capitalist suit’ has taken over her cave. It is hatred at first sight.

'Yet Nia is hiding for reasons of her own, ones that drag Jagger closer to death as they are forced on the run together and he is unwittingly pulled deeper into Nia’s reckless mission to help save the planet. But who can save Jagger from the relentless pursuit of the man who wants him dead?

'Both an electrifying cat-and-mouse-chase and an odd couple love story, The Rewilding captures the essence of what it means to be alive today in this cusp of change pulsing with possibilities. It is a passionate intimation of hope.'  (Publication summary)

As a young girl in Sydney, Rachel pays more attention than she perhaps should, to a British cartoon character who accesses different personas on separate adventures each time he goes into the changing room of a London costume shop. Then at an opportune moment the owner of the shop taps the gentleman on the shoulder, excusing him to go back to being himself.

In her early twenties, Rachel sets off for London with the aim of having a few adventures of her own. But unlike her childhood character, life irrevocably changes for Rachel once she leaves the safety and familiarity of home. Does she become the victim of a mysterious mental health illness while she is in Israel and Egypt, or is something else at play? Rachel is forced to accept there’s no coming back from some adventures, and that coming to terms with reality is perhaps her only real chance of accessing the life she craves most.'  (Publication summary)

'Two women from different worlds in Renaissance France cross paths in a way that changes both their lives.

'One is Marguerite de Navarre, a King’s sister. Powerful, privileged and widely admired, Marguerite must nonetheless marry where she is told to, regardless of her feelings, and – despite the thrilling new ideas of religious reform causing upheaval in France – must toe the line for the good of her brother’s kingdom. Ever a risk-taker, she does what she can to protect her reformist friends. But she has always loved to write, and when disaster strikes in her personal life, she picks up her pen – but some of what she writes will get her into trouble.

'The other is a cast out, itinerant child who longs to be a printer like her late father. Jehane goes dressed as a male by the name of Josse, at first for safety’s sake and then by choice, fending off the risks of being alone, unprotected and born female, poor but trying to live in freedom. Eventually Josse joins a group of printers and publishers in Paris. Despite her suspicion of men, she comes to idolise one among them. But can they be ‘true friends’, and can she share her whole self with him?

'Long before #MeToo, women were telling their ‘unspeakable’ stories, and these two, both rich and poor, are no exception. They come together in the most unexpected of ways. In The Queen’s Apprenticeship one of our very best writers brings to fully realised and magnificent life a world of drama and intrigue.' (Publication summary)

'So, was it hard to pretend I was “dead”? Well, my motivation was abundant; it was splendiferous, endless, you might say.’

'An American actress, renowned for being late, is living with her two cats in a modernist clifftop apartment in Sydney in the late 1980s.

'The recounting of her story is prompted by the arrival of an old typewriter and a book addressed to Zelda Zonk. And by the arrival of a young man called Daniel, who is locked out while house-sitting her neighbour’s apartment.

'Together Zelda and Daniel form an unlikely but close bond as they go walking, prepare dinner for Shabbat, traverse Sydney Harbour on a ferry and talk about their lives. Part of their bond is the discovery that they are both orphans. Daniel is also a habitué of the nearby sandstone cliffs where men have mysteriously gone missing.

'In Late, Michael Fitzgerald superbly captures the literary spirit and sensibility of an ageing woman and icon who has escaped celebrity. It is a haunting and lyrical novel about art, friendship, and confronting our fears.' (Publication summary)

'Never Look Desperate is Sedaris meets Fleabag, a tragi-comedy romance set in Melbourne 2023. It features cremation bling, pineapple underwear, grief and vaccinated cruise ships. The central characters Bernard, Goldie and Minh are everything TED Talks tell you not to be.

'The story tackles the absurdity of despair in a recovering world, the liberation from isolation and the wild frontier of middle-aged Tinder.' (Publication summary)

'In the one tumultuous day, Ch’anzu loses hir job and finds wife Scarlet in bed with a stranger. As life unexpectedly spirals out of control, Ch’anzu turns to hir charismatic Aunt Maé for comfort and wisdom, and makes the bold move to work on a project in Serengotti, a migrant African outpost in rural Australia.

'In a novel haunted by the strangeness and yearnings of a displaced community – both beautiful and fractured – Ch’anzu is forced to confront hir many demons. Back in the city, brother Tex has gone missing. In Serengotti violence and infidelity simmer.

'This is a novel bathed in sensuous, original language, a love letter to the strong women who bind families together despite everything. It’s also a tender remembrance of the many who haven’t or couldn’t survive the dislocations and tragedies of their turbulent pasts.' (Publication summary)