Cirrus@Austlit

'These short stories were written by fourteen Australian fiction authors who were each invited to create a story in response to a particular paragraph about the finding of a corpse.'(Publication summary)

'Story about a young woman shortly to be released from prison who murdered a brother and two sisters.' (Publication summary)

'Pluto Hartwig has got it all - charm, sophistication, a loving wife, a beautiful home, a luxurious Australian lifestyle, a successful career, loyal friends and a devoted dog. So why does he not feel happier? The author also wrote "Eden" and "Venter and Son".' (Publication summary)

''The Perfect Moment’ may be the world's worst play. It is certainly the worst-ever play to be mounted by the prestigious Melbourne Repertory Theatre. How could they have agreed to put it on?

'Humble Roger Normandy has the dubious honour of being creator of ‘The Perfect Moment’. Briefly, he envisages fame. Rudely, he is trampled by the giant egos who stride Melbourne Rep's boards.

'Salvation has never seemed further from hand.' (Publication summary)

'Tom Caxton, investigative journalist, joins forces with Police Sergeant Harry Metaxas, to discover evidence of the criminal dealings of an Australian millionaire businessman. The trail leads them from outback Queensland to Thailand and murder. Thriller set in Borroloola area at Aboriginal cattle station; addresses issues of identity, leadership, sacred sites and mining. ' (Publication summary)

'Further adventures of Syd Fish, the Darlinghurst private investigator who first appeared in the author's widely acclaimed 'Shaved Fish'. Story concerns a multi-million dollar investment site, the Sex Workers Union, political corruption and murder. Whilst having a distinctly Australian setting and tone, this novel pays homage to the wit and style of the American Thard-boiled' school of detective writers.' (Publication summary)

'An architect exiled from China meets an Australian woman writer who is terminally ill. He tells her traditional Chinese stories as a way of overcoming time/mortality, and of coming to terms with his own difficult past.

'For a book which takes loneliness and death for its themes, After China has unexpected reserves of warmth, affection and humour. Insisting on the erotic, it is surprisingly delicate, restrained and chaste. And for a work of such diverse and eclectic reference it is rewardingly resonant and interconnected. The whole novel is thus a brilliant feat of balance.' (Publication summary)

'Set in the South Australian outback, this novel continues the adventures of master thief Wyatt, first introduced in the author's earlier novel, "Kickback". In this novel, the Sydney mob has hired a bitter ex-policeman to kill Wyatt.' (Publication summary)

'In one despairing moment Theodosios abandons his wife and gorilla child and then spends a lifetime trying to get them back. But what's a lifetime in a place like this?

'One minute you're a woman. The next you're a bear. There's a woman here who is neither man nor woman. And a man who's both man and beast.

'Here nothing belongs to you - not even your grief. People steal your letters and gossip your thoughts before you've spoken them. And when they're desperate - and at some point everyone is desperate - they go to the whorehouse. . . From the centre of chaos, Mirella, the ancient whore, finds a calm place to tell this unforgettable, timeless tale.' (Publication summary)

'Grace Heatherton is a rancorous Nobel Prize-winning writer who does not intend her power to be limited by death, so bequeaths and distributes five versions of her manuscript "The Lost Journal of Lieutenant Cook". Is this Cook's private diary or are these just the works of a literary trickster?' (Publication summary)

'From the author of "The Factory", shortlisted for the National Book Council's Qantas New Writers Award, this book is set in the deceptive calm of Johannesburg's white liberal suburbs. Amiably married, Rosemary Williston lives in opulent paralysis. Until she meets Louise, and begins an affair.' (Publication summary)

'The New Year started with a bang in Sydney's Chinatown - and it wasn't just the fireworks. While the rest of the country were celebrating, the biggest bank job in Australia's history was taking place.

'The press dubbed it 'The Great Chinese Takeaway'. And inside those stolen safety deposit boxes were items of much more value than money.

'Claudia Valentine is called in by the Chen family who are desperate for the return of a gold key embellished by a dragon. The hunt for this family heirloom spins her into a world of ancient treasures and modern Triad killings, through sleazy back streets and exotic oriental temples. And, everywhere, nothing is as it seems.' (Publication summary)

'What looks like a tame brief soon runs feral as Felicio Tagg, Australia's most incompetent barrister, finds himself representing an egomaniacal grazier, falling in love with his client's disenchanted wife and pursuing his client's missing stud bull.' (Publication summary)

'Old Selwyn Dixon has been boring Syd Fish and other regulars at the Acropolis cafe for years with stories about his heyday as a jockey. When he goes missing, nobody notices but Val, the big-hearted waitress at the Kings Cross greasy spoon. Even Selwyn's employer, a social-climbing Sydney trainer, seems oddly uninterested in the little jockey's welfare.' (Publication summary)

'Carmen Molloy is driving home late at night during a storm when she accidentally hits a young man who steps out into the road. He dies. In shock, Carmen drives home without telling anyone, and when the man's body is found, she does not come forward. The novel deals with her internal turmoil as she tries to deal with her guilt about what happened, and her fear of being found out.'

'It is the start of a long, hot summer and Madalena Grimaldi has disappeared. Claudia is hired to find the missing schoolgirl but she's already working on a case - the death of Guy Valentine, her father.

As Claudia searches the streets, looking for the ghost of her derelict father and for the mysterious man who can lead her to Madalena, she finds herself sinking into a world where, for many, rock bottom is only the beginning.' (Publication summary)

'The brothers Kovalenko...did not kill Jews just because they were poor and Ukrainian, and did not know any better. They killed Jews because they believed that they themselves were savages.'

'The Hand that Signed the Paper tells the story of Vitaly, a Ukrainian peasant, who endures the destruction of his village and family by Stalin's communism. He welcomes the Nazi invasion in 1941 and willingly enlists in the SS Death Squads to take a horrifying revenge against those he perceives to be his persecutors.

'This remarkable novel, a shocking story of the hatred that gives evil life, is also an eloquent plea for peace and justice.' (Publication summary)

'The cold war is over. In Russia a reformist President fights to control a disintegrating empire. The American President is poised triumphantly to usher in a new world order.

'But now a secret they both believed was buried in the past threatens to destroy them both.

'Laura Bailey has been obsessed by the fate of her lover, listed as missing in action in Vietnam. Her dangerous search for the truth involves Bing Connick, an embittered war correspondent, as they pick up long-dead trails through Asia, Russia, the icy wastes of Kazakhstan ending in Lithuania as the Soviet Empire begins to collapse.

'As Laura and Bing come close to exposing both governments' betrayals, the KGB and CIA assassins are ready to strike.' (Publication summary)

'Born into a strict Christian family in Sydney at the start of the century, Annie contends with an overbearing mother and a harsh religion. Kept at home, partially deafened by illness and mistreatment, she clings to her mother and her dominating religious certainties. Yet something stirs under the starch of faith. Annie finds a friend late in life and discovers a passion for living to equal her passion for gardening. In her sixties, Annie confronts her mother.

'This is the story of one woman's struggle to lay claim to her own life. And within the seemingly narrow contours of family and church and garden, Annie discovers that it is, after all, a big life.' (Publication summary)

'Wyatt, the cool, ever-evasive thief, snatches the cash easily enough. He bypasses the alarm system, eludes the cops, makes it safely back to his hideout in Hobart. It's the diamond-studded Tiffany brooch—and perhaps the girl—that undoes him. Now some very hard people want to put Wyatt and that brooch out of circulation. But this is Wyatt's game and Wyatt sets the rules—even if it means a reckoning somewhere far from home. In a murky world where the cops are robbers, old-style criminal Wyatt positively shines.' (Publication summary)

'There are some things that you never talk about, thought Nonie, things you never say even when you want to. There are things you never ask, even when you are old. Only, the questions stay in your head always, and keep on asking inside you.

'Set in rural Australia during the unsettling years of World War I, The Hero is the story of an adolescent girl's growth towards adulthood and self acceptance. Nonie and her younger brothers and sisters are brought to live with their Aunt Ruth; their mother is dead, their father an absent hero on the Western Front.

'In the year that passes after arriving at Greystones, Nonie learns how to make sense of the adult world. She pieces together clues about her father and mother and their past. At first a silent observer, Nonie gradually acquires a sense of belonging through which she learns to give and take and to trust and love.

'The Hero is a novel for all ages, a novel you'll read and remember with joy. Its strength lies in Le Nay's remarkable descriptions, of the bush, the farm and her characters, all unmistakably Australian and yet, with themes that are universal.' (Publication summary)

'Exhaustion. and then, after exhaustion, light, creeping in, and with it fear, thought, calculation, that drowning in consciousness. I reach for her, or she me, sometimes violently, hands pulling, digging into flesh, dragging us back. As if that were a precipice, and one of us had nearly fallen.'

'A couple go into a room and will not come out until something—everything—is finished. A man sees in a famous painting something the artist has tried to erase, and which he pursues, like a clue to his own being, from gallery to gallery, story to story. David Brooks's previous books have established him as one of Australia's finest, most challenging writers. The imagination and eroticism of those books are here at new levels. From the haunting encounters of a sea captain in the eighteenth century to a vast Map Room in the twentieth, or the strange encodings in an asylum in the south of France, these are his most polished, elegant, and at times most disturbing stories so far.' (Publication summary)