AustLit

'The Octopus and I opens with a short chapter in the voice of an octopus, heavily pregnant, attempting to cross the isthmus at Eaglehawk Neck, near Port Arthur. “My body is brimming is pulsing is purring is ready,” the octopus narrates, “… the moonlight envelops me caressing my arms as they caress the kelpy floor the kelpy shore.” This is a gesture that sets up the book’s thematic and stylistic concerns: the novel is largely about the interconnections between the animal and human worlds, and the ethical problems that our relationships with different kinds of life forms often elide. Animals – the octopus, a mutton bird, a pair of seals – are important characters here, and while Erin Hortle’s attempts to enter their subjectivity aren’t always this successful, they provide a continual counterbalance to the dramas played out in the human characters’ lives. The book is very much a work of ecological fiction, a genre that is becoming increasingly common in Australian literature, and in which octopuses – because of their intelligence and strangeness – frequently occur.'  (Introduction)

'The plot unfurls slowly in Mirandi Riwoe’s Stone Sky Gold Mountain, which opens in the Palmer River goldfields in early colonial Australia. Disguised as a man for her physical safety, Ying toils with her brother Lai Yue in the hope of procuring enough of a fortune to take back to China, but life on the fields is relentless. They soon realise that gold-digging is untenable, and head to nearby Maytown in search of more stable work. There, second-generation British settler Meriem has been banished from her home town after an unwanted pregnancy. Now a housekeeper for sex worker Sophie, she is shunned by the townsfolk. After Lai Yue leaves for an overland expedition and Ying begins working as a shopkeeper for local Chinese man Jimmy, Meriem’s and Ying’s paths converge. They embark on a friendship coloured by caution and curiosity, an archetypal interracial tale of differences as both protagonists awkwardly feel their way around each other.' (Introduction)

'“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.” The eponymous protagonist of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient imagines a mapping of self that traces the hidden and intimate and reveals how we are “marked by nature” and by the flames of connection. It’s not enough “just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books.”' (Introduction)