Cirrus@Austlit

'That we are all spending more time at home these days goes without saying; for those of us in Melbourne, our four walls feel restraining when most ways of leaving them are proscribed. So let me persuade you of a marvellously legitimate alternative to breaking the law, sorting your messy passwords, or rearranging your higgledy-piggledy books into some kind of order. It’s called vicarious escape.' (Introduction)

'Andrea Goldsmith is a distinguished and prolific Australian writer. To review her new novel, Invented Lives, I returned to a review I did of her 2009 novel Reunion, to remind myself of what I’d said. In doing so, I noticed structural similarities between the two, and also to her award-winning 2015 novel The Memory Trap.'(Introduction)

'Dymphna Lodewyckx was a brilliant linguist who easily won prizes and scholarships but cannot be said to have pursued a career; instead, she married Manning Clark, who earned great fame as an Australian historian. Occasional translations and classes gave Dymphna much pleasure and some pride, but they were not her priority. How could they be, when she was her husband’s constant research assistant and unofficial editor, as well as the mother of their six children? This was clearly her choice.

'Wasn’t it?' (Publication summary)

'In 1862, Sonya Tolstoy married the greatest author the world has ever known, Leo Tolstoy. For forty-eight years they shared their lives in a union that was at once passionate, collegial and combative. Sixteen years younger than her husband, Sonya bore him thirteen children and worked for years as his copyist, rewriting countless drafts of his timeless novels. Both were mercurial and passionate personalities and, towards his end, Tolstoy deserted her.

In War & Peace and Sonya, Russian scholar Judith Armstrong tells Sonya's own story exploring their devotion and ambivalence to one another, their passion for great literature and the powers of the imagination, and showing us just how remarkably true to life fiction Judith Armstrong can be.' (Publisher's website)