Cirrus@Austlit

'Anam is a novel about memory and inheritance, colonialism and belonging, home and exile.

'A grandson tries to learn the family story. But what kind of story is it? Is it a prison memoir, about the grandfather imprisoned without charge or trial by a revolutionary government? Is it an oral history of the grandmother left behind to look after the children? Or is it a love story, or a detective tale?

'Moving from 1930s Hanoi through a series of never-ending wars and displacements to Saigon, Paris, Melbourne and Cambridge, Anam is a novel about memory and inheritance, colonialism and belonging, home and exile.

'Andre Dao mines his family and personal stories to turnover ideas that resonate with all of us around place and home, family legacy and expectations, ambition and sacrifice.

'Anam blends fiction and essay, theory and everyday life to imagine that which has been repressed, left out, and forgotten by archives and by families. As the grandson sifts through letters, photographs, government documents and memories, he has his own family to think about- a partner and an infant daughter. Is there a way to remember the past that creates a future for them as well? Or does coming home always involve a certain amount of forgetting?' (Publication summary)

'An imprisoned man with strange visions writes letters to his sister.

'A controversial business tycoon leaves his daughter a mysterious inheritance.

'A child is haunted by a green man with a message about the origins of their planet.

'In this striking collection of stories, the award-winning John Morrissey investigates colonialism and identity without ever losing sight of his characters’ humanity. Brilliantly imagined and masterfully observed, Firelight marks the debut of a writer we will be reading for decades to come.'(Publication summary)

'Unpicking the stitches of gender and genre, the stories in this searing, funny, haunting debut explore how our ideas of womanhood shape us, and what they cost us.

'‘My God darling – the women I know.’

'A young woman tries to cheat her algorithm, creating a wholesome online persona while her ‘real’ life dissipates. A grandmother speaks to her granddaughter through the fog of generations. Two lovers divide over alternative meat options. A factory worker fits eyes in companion dolls until she is called on to install her own.

'The women I know are sharp, absurd, sly, wrong, wry, repressed, hungry, horny, bold, envious, dominating, uncertain, overdetermined, underpaid, bored, smart, crystalizing, themselves.

'A burning talent with growing international recognition, Katerina Gibson’s work has appeared in Granta, Kill Your Darlings, Overland and elsewhere. She is the Pacific regional winner of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and recipient of the Felix Meyer Scholarship.' (Publication summary)

'A stunning, thought-provoking novel about facing up to your family and your future, dealing with timely issues around sexual consent and inherited trauma. Joey is young, indifferent. He’s drifting around Western Sydney unaware of how his passivity might lead him even further adrift, off the rails, into a violent crime.

'Meanwhile his grandmother Elaine – a proud Lebanese woman – tries to hold her family and herself together in the wake of Joey’s actions. In her family, history repeats itself, vices come and go, and uncovering long-buried secrets isn’t always cathartic.

'This gripping and hard-hitting novel reveals the richness and complexity of contemporary Australian life and tests the idea that facing consequences will make us better people.' (Publication summary)

'It's the 1950s in conservative Australia, and Christopher, a young gay man, moves to 'the City' to escape the repressive atmosphere of his tiny hometown. Once there, however, he finds that it is just as censorial and punitive, in its own way.

'Then Christopher meets Morgan, and the two fall in love - a love that breathes truth back into Christopher's stifled life. But the society around them remains rigid and unchanging, and what begins as a refuge for both men inevitably buckles under the intensity of navigating a world that wants them to refuse what they are. Will their devotion be enough to keep them together?

'In reviving a time that is still so recent yet so vastly different from now, Jay Carmichael has drawn on archival material, snippets of newspaper articles, and photos to create the claustrophobic environment in which these two men lived and loved. Told with Carmichael's ear for sparse, poetic beauty, Marlo takes us into the landscape of a relationship defined as much by what is said and shared as by what has to remain unsaid.'  (Publication summary)

'… most nights I find myself trying to combine with someone else to become this two-headed thing with flailing limbs, chomping teeth, and tangled hair. This new animal. I am medicated by another body. Drunk on warm skin. Dumbly high on the damp friction between them and me.

'It's not easy getting close to people. Amelia's meeting a lot of men but once she gets the sex she wants from them, that's it for her; she can't connect further. A terrible thing happened to Daniel last year and it's stuck inside Amelia ever since, making her stuck too.

'Maybe being a cosmetician at her family's mortuary business isn't the best job for a young woman. It's not helping her social life. She loves her job, but she's not great at much else. Especially emotion.

'And then something happens to her mum and suddenly Amelia's got too many feelings and the only thing that makes any sense to her is running away.

'It takes the intervention of her two fathers and some hilariously wrong encounters with other broken people in a struggling Tasmanian BDSM club to help her accept the truth she has been hiding from. And in a final, cataclysmic scene, we learn along with Amelia that you need to feel another person's weight before you can feel your own.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The Unknown Digger is Australia's most famous WWI poet. But for decades, his identity has remained a mystery. Enter Matthew Denton - a PhD student at University College, London - who believes the unknown digger to be fact one of Australia's greatest war heroes- Lieutenant Alan Lewis VC of the 10th Light Horse. As the story of Lieutenant Lewis, fighting his way across Sinai, Palestine, Jordan and Syria unfolds, the question of what makes him a poet, a lover and a hero becomes a troubled one. Meanwhile, in the footnotes, scholar Matt Denton is fighting his own battles with romance and with academia as he attempts to rewrite literary history.' (Publication summary)

'Set in the 1800s, Gabriel Fox is newly arrived to Van Diemen’s Land from England. Drawn by the promise of his heart’s desire and compelled to distance himself from pain at home, Gabrielle is on a quest to find a woman called Maryanne Maginn. His guide, a cannibal who is not all he seems, leads him north. As Gabriel traverses this wild country, he uncovers new truths buried within his own memory.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Sonny and Vince have always known each other. It took two years of juvie, a crazy mother (her), a violent father (him) and a porn stash for them to meet again.

'Sonny is in her last year of school and with protective parents she is forced to watch the world from her bedroom window. She has a habit of falling hopelessly in love with just about anyone. Vince is handsome, brash, a leader in the gangs, who became a legend after he was taken away by juvenile justice two years ago. Now, Vince is back. One problem – they have not been friends since they were children. Growing up in the vertigo of 1990's Cabramatta, of households which harbour histories and parents who are difficult to love, they stumble upon each other once more.

'While sharing the ugly and scary details of Western Sydney in this time, Vivian Pham also illuminates the beauty, hope, possibility, kindness and love that can spring from small gestures and strong friendships.' (Publication summary)

'Jena Chung plays the violin. She was once a child prodigy and is now addicted to sex. She's struggling a little. Her professional life comprises rehearsals, concerts, auditions and relentless practice; her personal life is spent managing family demands, those of her creative friends, and lots of sex. And then she meets Mark—much older and worldly-wise—who bewitches her. Could this be love? When Jena wins an internship with the New York Philharmonic, she thinks the life she has dreamed of is about to begin. But when Trump is elected, New York changes irrevocably and Jena along with it. She comes to learn that there are many different ways to live and love and that no one has the how-to guide for any of it—not even her indomitable mother.

'A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing unflinchingly explores the confusion of having expectations upturned, and the awkwardness and pain of being human in our increasingly dislocated world—and how, in spite of all this, we still try to become the person we want to be. It is a dazzling, original and astounding debut from a young writer with a fierce, intelligent and fearless new voice.

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Before the bushfires -- before the front of flames comes roaring over the hills -- the ridges are thick with gums.

'After the fires, the birds have gone. There is only grey ash and melted metal, the blackened husks of cars.

'And the lost people -- in temporary accommodation on the outskirts of the city, on the TV news in borrowed clothes, or remembered in flyers on a cafe wall.

'A Constant Hum grapples with the aftermath of disaster with an eye for telling detail. Some of these stories cut to the bone; others are empathetic stories of survival, even hope. All are gripping and beautifully written, heralding the arrival of an important new voice in literary fiction.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'IN the comic-tragic story ‘Lucky Ticket’, the narrator, a genial disabled old man, sells lottery tickets on a street corner in bustling Saigon. In ‘Mekong Love’, two young people in a restrictive society find a way to consummate their relationship—in an extraordinary tropical landscape.

'In ‘Abu Dhabi Gently’, a story of dreams and disappointment, of camaraderie and disillusionment, a migrant worker leaves Vietnam to earn money in the UAE in order to be able to marry his fiancée. ‘White Washed’ depicts a strained friendship between two students in Melbourne, the Vietnamese narrator and a white girl.

'What does it mean to be Asian? What does it mean to be white? And what makes up identity? In Lucky Ticket, Joey Bui introduces a diverse range of characters, all with distinctive voices, and makes us think differently about mixed-race relationships, difficulties between family generations, war, dislocation and identity.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A masterful collection of horizons and departures, heartbreak and seduction, from an internationally acclaimed Australian author.

'These superbly crafted stories follow the fates of characters who, by choice or by force, are travelling beyond the boundaries of their known worlds. We meet them negotiating reluctant partings, navigating uncertain returns or biding the disquieting calm that often precedes decisive action.

'An agoraphobic French émigré watches disturbing terrorist footage as she minds a dog named Chavez. A young couple weather the interiority of a Montreal winter, more attuned to the illicit goings-on of their neighbours than to their own hazy, unfolding futures. A Melbourne writer of real-estate listings reflects on the stifling power of shared history as she wonders what life might be like over the fence. Other stories play out in places just beyond the brink of familiarity: flooded townships and distant lakes, sunlit woodlands or paths bright with ice, places of unpredictable access and spaces scrubbed from maps.

'From the Catskill Mountains to Snowy Mountains, the abandoned island outports of Newfoundland to the sprawl of an Australian metropolis, this scintillating collection from one of Australia’s most gifted writers shows us how the places we inhabit shape us in ways both remote and intimate.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.