Cirrus@Austlit

'This excellent debut novel follows a weary son who clashes over his gender transition with his elderly mother, a supplement devotee hellbent on becoming an influencer' (Introduction)

'The most surprising – and refreshing – thing about Carly-Jay Metcalfe’s memoir is how raunchy and raucous it is, especially for a book about lifelong illness. In Breath, Metcalfe discusses her cystic fibrosis and the complexities of survival.' (Introduction)

'Most of the events and interactions in Katherine Brabon’s Body Friend occur in the months immediately after the narrator undergoes major surgery, to ameliorate some of the effects of her chronic autoimmune illness. She returns to work – and by extension, to the greater social world – towards the end of the novel. On her first day back, she feels herself “on a pendulum between two different selves”. One of these selves is distant and almost skittish, longing for nothing more than to be alone and back at home. The other is “a more clear and confident person” who moves and speaks with ease, and, importantly, “control[s] the illness” – or, at least, her reaction to its fluctuations and pain.' (Introduction)   

'Time, I kept hearing people say that year, has broken. Time broke: as if it were an object knocked from a shelf, or an ancient stuttering machine with parts worn through,

'I'm getting ahead of myself already.

'Time is a function of narrative. (Introduction)

'“How are they losing their children like this, all over the country?” asks an Afghan cameleer as he passes through the town of Fairly, where The Sun Walks Down is set. Days earlier, the farmhand Billy considers the fear that “a lost child” evokes in the people now implanted on his Country: it is “the one cost of settling on this land that they consider unreasonable”. His sister, once employed as a nursemaid, retells the tale of the Pied Piper, speaking of her two stolen daughters; an Irish housekeeper, in counterpoint, describes an Indigenous story once overheard, about a mother spirit looking for her missing children.' (Introduction)   

'Driving his young daughters home from school, Limberlost’s protagonist, Ned, stumbles through an accidental telling of an anecdote from childhood. The details, for which his children press him, suddenly feel distant, strange. Ned is struck for a moment by some fundamental grief, and wonders “if the troubled boy of that summer would recognise the man he’d become”.'(Introduction)   

'History happens to us in dreams: it is experienced and understood there as much as in our waking lives. Neuroscientists have known this for some time, but these pandemic years have provided a sudden abundance of data, intensive and immediate, and global in scale, for those who work with dreams. Their reports are of dreams about swarming insects, billowing gas, and other transferred contaminations; about shadowed monsters and snipers lurking on the other side of a window or wall. There are more literal dreams about funerals and hospitals, accidental handshakes or hugs; about forgotten face masks, a new variant of that archetypal dream of public nakedness realised suddenly and far too late. In pandemic dreams, the dead speak. The dreamer cannot find their way home, is pursued. All of these are dreams that grapple with upheaval and threat, with fear, with the difficult adjustments to a world unsteadied suddenly, transformed.'(Introduction)

'Sometimes when we read, and never quite when we expect it, there are encounters that feel like a recognition. They lodge within us: I have friends who call these burrs in the brain, or splinters – but to me they’ve never felt like foreign bodies, stuck on or stuck in the skin. They go deeper. They become a part of who we are. Living within me like this, I know, is a single image from The Grass Sister, the first of Gillian Mears’ books that I ever read. A snapshot: it’s from a small and deeply intimate scene between the protagonist Avis and her lover Lavinia; the pair are lying in bed and one of them – I think it is Avis, but can’t be sure – admires the soft and downy line of darker hair running down the other’s lower belly, beneath her navel. Snail trail, I sometimes hear this now, although when I first read the book, just over ten years ago, I had never heard that term. I’d never seen one on another woman (though not for lack of trying) and was strangely ashamed of my own – but for Avis, it is not only beautiful and individual but electric: erotically charged, terribly and irresistibly so.' (Introduction)