AustLit

'This memoir describes two years the author spent with her young family in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Tells of her struggles to adapt to a new marriage, to maintain her identity as a painter, to care for her children and to cope with her new surroundings. Includes a glossary.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Father of all Stories is about how all of us, at some point in our lives, have to invent ourselves in order to transcend the seemingly concrete nature of reality. In essence it is a coming of age story exploring a threshold in time where invention can be at its most radical and potent – and yet at its most fragile.

'Carla has a lot of inventing to do. She has a passion for books and an extreme talent for writing, but was born into a family that has no value for education and parents who want to kick their kids out of their council home the day they leave school. However, a passionate high school teacher and a crusader for equality persuades her gifted young student to imagine an alternative narrative. Putting in hours of her time, she takes Carla on an inspirational journey through literature and helps her to win a place to study English at Cambridge.

'The fairytale story imagined by the two of them falls short of a successful new beginning when Carla finds herself completely incapacitated by feelings of inadequacy once surrounded by the ‘Queen’s children’ at Cambridge. Desperately lonely, she returns to her hometown scene in London to seek the familiar and join a writing course with some friends. This group of friends are young and vulnerable, hungry for success, for love, for acknowledgement. Destabilised already by their desires, they enter the circumference of Gurdev – writing teacher, manipulator and God man, who encourages his young students to go beyond the limits of their creativity: to break down distinctions between the real and the unreal – to enjoy the liberty of the unfamiliar – a place that he is all too familiar with.

'Carla finds herself pulled into Gurdev’s magnetic field through an unstoppable physical attraction, but she is not alone. Everyone in this awe-struck group of young writers who call themselves the Post-Bloomsburys is defined and created by their encounters with Gurdev. And while some are attracted to him, others are repelled, feeling that they are simply playing their part in a greater narrative – Gurdev’s manipulative metafiction.

'Gurdev, the master storyteller, is called to account by his students when they feel his imagination has gone too far. Lives are at risk, not to mention sanity, security and relationships. But whoever said that riding the waves of creativity would be a comfortable exercise?

'Intuitively, Carla knows that she has to abandon herself to Gurdev’s unreality in order to create her own – to discover an enduring strength and sense of her place in the world. But there are doubts that plague her – like her concern for her unstable friend, Daniel, who everyone says is being tipped over the edge by Gurdev; or the anger of her friend Boyd, who claims that Gurdev convinced him to live out a gay narrative; or Faith, who claims that Carla and she have been sharing the affections of their teacher.

'And then there’s Virginia Woolf who appears when Carla finds a ‘room of her own,’ and who stays throughout the narrative to give her (usually unsolicited) advice on how to handle the uncertainties of fiction.

'Father of all Stories is an ambitious novel showcasing the writing skills of its author, its narrator and its characters, who together demonstrate the pleasures of making a pen sing and the profound truth that for the better part of our lives we live in our imaginations, and in doing so, create our own reality.'

Source: Author's blurb (http://www.bemlehunte.com/father-of-all-stories.html). Sighted: 28/03/2017

'Edwina Nearly has problems which range from the banal to the absurd. Her neighbours are fanatical control freaks who leave threatening letters on her doorstep. Her mother, who writes software programs by day and works as a belly dancer by night, is dating a series of unsuitable men and making herself miserable. Her brother is becoming robotic. And now her diary has developed a will of its own and is writing back to her, offering unwanted advice.

'To give herself a break, she decides to visit the Art Gallery one afternoon. There, she falls, Alice-like, into a painting, 'The Garden Of Earthly Delights', a place in which the laws of physics do not apply.

'Edwina finds that she is able to come and go between the Garden and her home in inner-city Sydney at will. All deeply weird, but also seductive, especially when she meets the beautiful and complex Janus - who looks a lot like Paul, a boy Edwina would very much like to know better. Against the advice of her prophetic diary, Edwina rushes headlong into love.

'But who is this enigmatic Janus? How can it be that he bears such an uncanny resemblance to Paul? When Janus wants to enter Edwina's world and finds his way out of the painting, he threatens to destroy Edwina and those she loves'.

Source: bookseller's website.

'Climate scientist Dr.Leo Wetherill is researching rainmaking in the Australian desert. But the conundrums of weather prediction turn out to be simple next to the perplexing personal discoveries of his own imaginative ecology.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Wutheringink).

'Sangita loves to sing. But when she leaves her small village for school in the big city of Kathmandu, fear makes her lose her sweet voice. Will she ever make friends in this strange place with the bully Yamu close by? Will she learn to read?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'To know is enough. To know we killed her together. I willed it, he took the blame, but we did it together. One day he'll look me full in the face and he'll sat it. He'll say: You know why it happened. Yes, I'll say, I know. The air will be noise enough, we won't need more words, but he'll say a few because I am a child. We did it because I know the secret. I am the secret.

'If Leaning Towards Infinity explored the relationship between mothers and daughters and the pursuit of mathematics, Painted Woman gives us the tight and tangled knot binding a father and daughter, and the pursuit of art. Death and art, violence and love, possession and yearning; this is the story of the emergence of a woman artist, because of and despite all.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Alison's childhood is a stage on which the fickle behavior of adults is played out and where the catalysts for her development are the opposing forces of passion and indifference. As a young woman she encounters Diane, a gifted rebel from a suburban home whose chafing against conformity has resulted in a prison sentence. Alison arrives to tutor the recalcitrant student and the rest is captivation.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Wutheringink edition).

'Francis Bacon's work and life continue to fascinate and appall long after his death almost a quarter of a century ago, as it will for centuries to come, and in Three Furies, Australian writer Stephen Sewell examines the sado-masochistic world he inhabited with his friend, model and lover, George Dyer, before Dyer's suicide in 1971, just as Bacon was being celebrated as the greatest figurative artist of the Twentieth Century at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

'Acerbic, selfish and cruelly intelligent, Bacon's unflinching courage nevertheless produced some of the most disturbing images of humanity to come out of that terrible century, and in Three Furies Sewell once again demonstrates his mastery of the epic to produce a terrifying account of solitude and loneliness in the midst of the frenetic celebrity culture of an unhinged world.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Wutheringink edition).

'Gerard Oakes has enough aggro going on in his life and it’s about to get worse.

He’s been booted off his footy team for mooning a female referee: “how many bad decisions does a bloke have to stomach?”

'His girlfriend has just dumped him: “Sometimes there’s more fundamental things between a man and a woman than just whether you hate each other’s guts.”

'He’s been sacked from his day job as a cigarette salesman: “some places you walk in and they treat you like a drug pusher.”

'And his pride and joy, an HSV Commodore, has just been nicked.

'Enter Lester Allardyce, a loner and a social misfit who goes on a killing spree in a suburban shopping mall. As Gerard’s week goes from bad to worse, their lives become linked in an unimageinable way. What follows is a steady descent into creepy comic madness as Gerard spirals into a fantasy world, culminating in a chilling finale.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Wutheringink edition).

'A memoir about the connection between a woman and a motherless child - and about the transforming nature of singing.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Wutheringink edition).

'The Secret Death of Salvador Dali is a surrealistic account of the lamentable life and deplorable death of the great and infamous Spanish painter, Salvador Dali, who left his indelible mark on Twentieth Century art with a host of unforgettable paintings but who was incapable of crossing the road without holding someone's hand. An astonishingly self-engrossed narcissist, he was undoubtedly a genius who fascinated and infuriated everyone who knew him. Revolutionary, fascist, narcissist, masturbator, Dali was finally Dali! his own work of art, a consummate performer whose performance was his very own life.

'Written by one of Australia's best known writers, this play enters the phantasmagorical world of Dali to dissect the notions of genius, art and politics and to ask the questions, does great art justify terrible behaviour and do you have to be a mad exhibitionist to thrive in an art world being swallowed by the voraciously hungry market.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Bryan Mars was an Australian swimming legend and surf rescue hero brought down by over-eating. He blew it when he blew out, just before the Polympics. Then he disappeared.

'Director Stirling Seagrave wants to make the movie of Bryan’s life. Soap opera star

Garvey Quinn agrees to put on weight for the role. Stirling tells Garvey he will be able to lose the fat after the film is made. Garvey is not so sure, but his actress girlfriend tells him he owes it to his art to give it a go, after all, De Niro did it in Raging Bull. And so the home deliveries of KFC begin.

'Told in the voices of Garvey and Bryan, this is a poignant comedy about celebrity, sport, film-making, and what it’s like to be fat. Really fat.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Wutheringink edition).

'Aakash, venerated sage and healer, is the founder of Prakriti – an abundant farm in the Himalayas. From this soulful mountain home, his children embark on the journeys that will sway the destinies of future generations: gentle son Ram, whose fierce search for enlightenment will force him to choose between his family and his soul; daughter Tulsi Devi, whose convent schooling provides an unexpected, brutal education forever altering her life; Tulsi Devi's beloved first child, Jivan – born in the waters of the Ganges, cruelly separated from his mother; and Aakash's granddaughter Rohini, who travels across the world on a painted bus to a new land and a new kind of freedom, immersing herself in the London of the 1960s.

'With Rohini's daughter, Saakshi, the search for enlightenment comes full circle, and the great-granddaughter returns to her spiritual home – the holy mountains of Prakriti, where their family story first began. Both magical and utterly compelling, this spellbinding novel interweaves family sagas with the richness of Indian mysticism, creating an intimate portrait of an unforgettable family.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Set in mainly in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille of the 1970s 'Lines of Flight' is a feminist Künstlerinroman about a young Australian woman’s struggle to break from ‘daddy’s bag of images’, out of the entrapment of patriarchal perspectives, to find new ‘lines of flight’ into creative becoming as an artist and as a woman.'

*Source: Publisher's blurb (Wutheringink).