AustLit

'Set in an ominous underwater world marred by human destruction, the stories in Mer unsettle traditional mermaid mythology - beyond gender, beyond beauty, beyond romance. Merfolk have ruled their watery domain for untold years, but humans threaten it with deadly danger. Stranded and alone, Odel haunts an abandoned lake. Ondine drags her prey to a graveyard of their own making. Unzel pursues a threatening boat. Nothing left to lose, the merfolk will do whatever it takes to defend their home - no matter who gets in their way. In her debut collection, Samantha Amy Mansell weaves a series of evocative tales about vengeance, loss and the right to survive. Mer asks not what, but who, lurks in the deep.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Robert Hassan believes that we are ‘trapped in a digital prison of constant distraction’, and that the time we spend on screens is draining more from us than hours in the day. With the increasing amount of attention that digital devices demand, diminishing our capacity for reflection, there is less time to stop and think about our lives.

'So what happens when we remove these technologies altogether?

'In order to break free from the ‘digital prison’, Hassan booked passage on a containership and spent five weeks travelling from Melbourne to Singapore – disconnected and essentially alone. In this space of isolation and reflection, he was able to reconnect with lost memories and interrogate the temporality of both ‘clock time’ and lived experience.

'Uncontained is an account of Hassan’s voyage of discovery – a must-read for anyone who resents the encroachment of the digital on their inner world.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

''Welcome to Bellevue, where the mountains meet the sea…'

'Harry wakes on a ferry with no memory of how he came to be there. The boat is bound for Bellevue, a place he has never heard of. When he goes ashore, planning to catch the next boat out, his attempts to leave are thwarted.

'Feeling trapped and alone, Harry gradually gets to know and trust some of the locals, and hopes he is on the way to learning the mystery that holds him in this strange seaside town.

'But then a series of murders grips Bellevue, threatening Harry's new friend Xanthe and fuelling Harry's desperation for answers.

'Welcome to Bellevue is a fantasy action and adventure story, from first-time author Seth Robinson.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

A lost-race romance story. Typically, in this popular late-nineteenth century genre, male English adventurers travel beyond the edges of the known world and have their masculine and racial identities tested, but ultimately affirmed, in encounters with a lost race, remnants of an ancient civilisation often led by a female chief.

Source: Carter, David. How people have imagined Queensland. Queensland Historical Atlas, 2010.

'In 2005, Emma Marie Jones lost her beloved younger sister in a heartbreaking accident. Something to Be Tiptoed Around is an experimental memoir, in which Emma explores the nature of grief, loss, memory and femininity. Drawing on elements of Greek mythology and literary theory, Something to Be Tiptoed Around is a multilayered exploration of the fate of human love after death.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The Forger’s Wife (1856) is a lively adventure novel, set in an unruly colonial Sydney where everyone is on the make. The forger’s wife is a young woman who follows her rakish husband out to Australia and struggles to survive as her marriage falls apart. She soon meets Detective George Flower, a powerful man with a cavalier sense of justice and retribution. Flower literally controls the fortunes of the colony: taking on the local bushrangers, inspecting colonial authorities, and helping himself to the spoils along the way.

'First serialised in Fraser’s Magazine in 1852, The Forger’s Wife was popular in its time and was reprinted many times over. It is Australia’s first detective novel – and most likely, the first detective novel in the Anglophone world.' (From 2017 edition)