Cirrus@Austlit

'‘... far better than any novel; an incomparable record of a great family and of a series of great actions.' The Bulletin When Patrick Durack left Western Ireland for Australia in 1853, he was to found a pioneering dynasty and build a cattle empire across the great stretches of Australia. With a profound sense of family history, his grand-daughter, Mary Durack reconstructed the Durack saga - a story of intrepid men and ground-breaking adventure. This sweeping tale of Australia and Australians remains a classic nearly fifty years on.' (2008 Publication summary)

Fred Scully is in another country, a 'desert Irishman' far from home. After two long years of travelling through Europe, he decided to move his family from Australia to western Ireland. Scully arrived weeks ahead of his family to renovate the old farmhouse they'd bought in the shadow of a castle in County Offally, and which he's renovated by hand. Now, at the gate of Shannon's international airport, he anxiously awaits the arrival of his pregnant wife and seven-year-old daughter, envisioning a new life ahead, a fresh start. He has waited for and worried about this for months. He is a man who does not like being alone. The plane lands, the glass doors to the terminal slide open and his daughter emerges. Alone. There is no note, no word of explanation from his wife, only the mute silence of his stunned child. In an instant, Scully's life goes down in flames. This is a story of a marriage in our time. So begins a love-crazed odyssey across Europe, to the underside of the male psyche, in search of a woman vanished.

(Adapted from Trove)

Fred Scully is in another country, a 'desert Irishman' far from home. After two long years of travelling through Europe, he decided to move his family from Australia to western Ireland. Scully arrived weeks ahead of his family to renovate the old farmhouse they'd bought in the shadow of a castle in County Offally, and which he's renovated by hand. Now, at the gate of Shannon's international airport, he anxiously awaits the arrival of his pregnant wife and seven-year-old daughter, envisioning a new life ahead, a fresh start. He has waited for and worried about this for months. He is a man who does not like being alone. The plane lands, the glass doors to the terminal slide open and his daughter emerges. Alone. There is no note, no word of explanation from his wife, only the mute silence of his stunned child. In an instant, Scully's life goes down in flames. This is a story of a marriage in our time. So begins a love-crazed odyssey across Europe, to the underside of the male psyche, in search of a woman vanished.

(Adapted from Trove)

'Foxspell is a fable of shape-shifters and animal spirits, of teenage gangs and schoolyard friends and finding your place in the world—or worlds—all concentrated in a dense, vivid corner of the half-wild Adelaide hills. A Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Older Readers, Foxspell is a mysterious and unforgettable dream.

'Deserted by his father, Tod moves with his sisters and mother into his grandmother's house in the foothills of Adelaide, South Australia. He finds refuge in the hills and quarries, where he meets a fox spirit who teaches him to cross between the human and animal worlds. As his family life and his involvement in a local gang become more complicated, the lure of the fox grows ever stronger.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'‘... far better than any novel; an incomparable record of a great family and of a series of great actions.' The Bulletin When Patrick Durack left Western Ireland for Australia in 1853, he was to found a pioneering dynasty and build a cattle empire across the great stretches of Australia. With a profound sense of family history, his grand-daughter, Mary Durack reconstructed the Durack saga - a story of intrepid men and ground-breaking adventure. This sweeping tale of Australia and Australians remains a classic nearly fifty years on.' (2008 Publication summary)

This is Albion Gidley Singer at the pen, locked in behind his mahogany, filling the silence around himself with the busy squeak of the nib across the paper. I will begin when I always like to begin, with a fact. Once upon a time, there was a man and his daughter, all was well.

Albion Gidley Singer appears an entirely proper man: husband, father, pillar of the community. But he is a hollow man, and within him are frightened and frightening dark places from which spring loathing and fear of female flesh. And, finally, the kind of violence that might call itself love.

It is through the eyes of Albion Gidley Singer that the world is seen and in his voice that the story is told, and it is a voice that never suffers from self-doubt. He can never know, as the reader does, that his view of the world is grotesquely distorted by his damaged self. Kate Grenville has written a disturbing, shocking and darkly funny novel that resonated in the mind with the truth of great writing. Dark Places is a literary triumph.