Cirrus@Austlit

'The celebrated, Walkley Award-winning author on how global warming is changing not only our climate but our culture. Beautifully observed, brilliantly argued and deeply felt, these essays show that our emotions, our art, our relationships with the generations around us – all the delicate networks that make us who we are – have already been transformed.

'In Signs and Wonders, Falconer explores how it feels to live as a reader, a writer, a lover of nature and a mother of small children in an era of profound ecological change.

'Building on Falconer’s two acclaimed essays, ‘Signs and Wonders’ and the Walkley Award-winning ‘The Opposite of Glamour’, Signs and Wonders is a pioneering examination of how we are changing our culture, language and imaginations along with our climate. Is a mammoth emerging from the permafrost beautiful or terrifying? How is our imagination affected when something that used to be ordinary – like a car windscreen smeared with insects – becomes unimaginable? What can the disappearance of the paragraph from much contemporary writing tell us about what’s happening in the modern mind?

'Scientists write about a 'great acceleration' in human impact on the natural world. Signs and Wonders shows that we are also in a period of profound cultural acceleration, which is just as dynamic, strange, extreme and, sometimes, beautiful. Ranging from an ‘unnatural’ history of coal to the effect of a large fur seal turning up in the park below her apartment, this book is a searching and poetic examination of the ways we are thinking about how, and why, to live now.' (Publication summary)

''Why didn’t you and Daddy want people to give you any presents?' I used to ask. But my mother could never be drawn into talking about the wedding. I assumed it was because she did not wish to be reminded of the ghastly mistake she had made in marrying my father.

'AS a child, Nadia Wheatley had a sense of the great divide between her parents, who had met and married while working in Germany on the front line of the Cold War. Growing up in 1950s Australia, the child became a player in their deadly contest. Was she her mother’s daughter, or her father’s creature?

'At the age of ten, the author began writing down her mother’s stories: her Cinderella-like childhood, and her escape into a career as army nurse and refugee aid worker. Fifty years later, the finished memoir is not only a loving tribute but also a social history of twentieth-century Australia, told through the lives of a mother and her daughter.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.