Cirrus@Austlit

Last year, as New Australian Fiction 2020 went to print, we were only just beginning to understand the effects COVID-19 would have on Australia and the world at large. Shortly before copies of that anthology arrived in our Melbourne office, Victoria entered what would become an unprecedented 112-day lockdown.

'Now, more than halfway through 2021, civic responses to the pandemic continue to reshape the way we are living across the country. International borders are still closed, with no reopening in sight. We've avoided many of the horrors experienced elsewhere, but our remoteness on the map has never felt more acute. Isolation and loneliness—their literal forms in the shape of lockdowns, travel restrictions, families and friends divided by interstate border closures, as well as the loss of loved ones to the coronavirus and other associated illnesses—have been some of the devastating consequences of this crisis.'  (Introduction) 

'New Australian Fiction features brilliant writers with distinct experiences, voices and styles from all corners of Australia. Together they showcase the strength and diversity of Australian short fiction at its best.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A page-turning World War Two spy thriller, based on true events.

''We trade in secrets here, Evelyn. There's no shame in having a few of your own. Our only concern is for who might discover them.'

'Out of place at boarding school, scholarship girl Evelyn Varley realises that the only way for her to fit in is to be like everyone else. She hides her true self and what she really thinks behind the manners and attitudes of those around her. By the time she graduates from Oxford University in 1939, ambitious and brilliant Evelyn has perfected her performance.

'War is looming. Evelyn soon finds herself recruited to MI5, and the elite counterintelligence department of Bennett White, the enigmatic spy-runner. Recognising Evelyn's mercurial potential, White schools her in observation and subterfuge and assigns her the dangerous task of infiltrating an underground group of Nazi sympathisers working to form an alliance with Germany.

'But befriending people to betray them isn't easy, no matter how dark their intent. Evelyn is drawn deeper into a duplicity of her own making, where truth and lies intertwine, and her increasing distrust of everyone, including herself, begins to test her better judgement. When a close friend becomes dangerously ensnared in her mission, Evelyn's loyalty is pushed to breaking point, forcing her to make an impossible decision.

'A powerfully insightful and luminous portrait of courage and loyalty, and the sacrifices made in their name.' (Publication summary)

'New Australian Fiction features brilliant writers with distinct experiences, voices and styles from all corners of Australia. Together they showcase the strength and diversity of Australian short fiction at its best.'(Publication summary)

'There is an elusive element to selecting and editing fiction. We are all creatures of taste; it follows, therefore, that we have particular tastes in our reading too.'

'There is an elusive element to selecting and editing fiction. We are all creatures of taste; it follows, therefore, that we have particular tastes in our reading to.' (Introduction)

'New Australian Fiction is a collection of eighteen stories from some of Australia's best and brightest writers of short fiction. Featuring stories from: Chloe Michele, Jack Kirne, Julie Koh, Craig Cormick, Andrea Gillum, Tony Birch, Laura Elizabeth Woollett, Josh Kemp, Zoë Bradley, Allee Richards, Khalid Warsame, Mikaella Clements, A.S. Patrić, Melanie Saward, Laura Elvery, Gretchen Shirm, Wayne Marshall, Anne Hotta.' (Publication summary)

'It is night. They move with such stealth they could be almost floating along the road. I can't see faces, just the outline of their movement. But when the moon drifts out from behind a cloud, bathing the road in an urgent sort of light, I see how they're all gazing up towards me.

''They're coming back,' I murmur. I turn to Kendall, and she puts her sewing aside, eyes on me. They never waiver.

'It was supposed to be a place where teenagers would learn resilience, confidence and independence, where long hikes and runs in the bush would make their bodies strong and foster a connection with the natural world. Living in bare wooden huts, cut off from the outside world, the students would experience a very different kind of schooling, one intended to have a strong influence over the kind of adults they would eventually become.

'Fourteen-year-old Rebecca Starford spent a year at this school in the bush. In her boarding house sixteen girls were left largely unsupervised, a combination of the worst behaved students and some of the most socially vulnerable. As everyone tried to fit in and cope with their feelings of isolation and homesickness, Rebecca found herself joining ranks with the powerful girls, becoming both a participant–and later a victim–of various forms of bullying and aggression.

'Bad Behaviour tells the story of that year, a time of friendship and joy, but also of shame and fear. It explores how those crucial experiences affected Rebecca as an adult and shaped her future relationships, and asks courageous questions about the nature of female friendship.

'Moving, wise and painfully honest, this extraordinary memoir shows how bad behaviour from childhood, in all its forms, can be so often and so easily repeated throughout our adult lives.' (Publication summary)

'Rebecca Starford on writers keeping fit in life and art.'

'Fire is an element deeply embedded in the Australian consciousness. In recent times it has been associated with natural disasters such as Ash Wednesday and Black Saturday, terrifying and deadly bushfires with biblical monikers. The danger of fire has been always been present in our literature, too, from the works of Dorothy Mackellar to Judith Wright to Les Murray. It tears through communities with devastating consequences, but in the bush it also has the capacity to renew and regenerate – that is, after all, how Indigenous Australians have applied fire to the land for thousands of years. But as Andrew McGahan’s extraordinary novel The White Earth (Allen & Unwin, 2004) reveals, some blights on the national conscience can never be scorched clean.' (Introduction)