AustLit

'When Eleanor gets her dream job as a teacher in Talbingo, a hamlet in the Snowy Mountains, it seems as if all her problems are solved. Clean air and country life are just what she needs to complete her breast cancer recovery, with bonus respite from her indifferent friends and the kindly doctor she tried to pash. Her best friend, Sally, has gone full Bridezilla, and her ex, Josh, has got a new girlfriend – “Delores of the double-D cups” – in record time, and everyone else is implying she brought cancer on herself: “Well, you have always been a stresser.”'   (Introduction)

'“Family and selflessness are at the heart of the culture that I was raised within,” writes Zoya Patel, whose debut memoir charts the “mishmash” of her Fijian–Indian–Australian heritage. “Self-determination is a conceit, and the wellbeing of the majority is prioritised.”'  (Introduction)

'Kids at school say Simon is “weird”. His brother Davey questions why he never speaks. Grandma secretly takes him to various doctors, while Mum won’t get out of bed. Cassie, his first friend in years, affectionately calls him “numpty”. In Simon’s brain, however, all his focus is required to keep chaos at bay. Borders between inside and outside are permeable: dust triggers asthma that flaps like a bird caught in his rib cage, a reassuring touch on the shoulder scalds, a breeze on his sweaty limbs makes storm clouds gather around his shoulders.' (Introduction)

'Introducing They Cannot Take the Sky, a collection of testimonies from people in detention on Manus and Nauru, Christos Tsiolkas wrote of the intellectual abstraction necessary to make refugees’ futures fodder for public debate: “We forget that the asylum seeker and the refugee is a real person, with a real body and a real consciousness, that they are as human as we are.” Such wilful forgetting is impossible once we’ve borne witness to their stories, in all their human singularity.'  (Introduction)

'When my mind returns to Jessie Cole’s grief memoir Staying, her third book after the novels Darkness on the Edge of Town and Deeper Water, my thoughts flood with a lush green. It returns often, to the secluded Eden in northern New South Wales where Jessie and her baby brother, Jake, are born. Built by hippie parents searching for a different life, their haphazard house doesn’t intrude on the surrounding forest but evolves symbiotically, limbs tenderly entwined. “We all grew together, from nothing much to something,” writes Cole.' (Introduction)