AustLit

'Anna Downes’s first novel is a thriller that poses uncomfortable questions about families.'

'This week we’re delighted to bring you an extract from Dani Powell’s debut novel Return to Dust. As the title suggests, it is a novel about grief, but it is also a vivid and intimate portrait of the landscape and people of central Australia. Of long road trips with unexpected detours, and life in remote Indigenous communities. The red dust of the desert spills from its pages as we follow Amber, who has returned to Mparntwe/Alice Springs, still mourning the death of her brother.

'When Amber first arrived in the town 10 years earlier, she’d felt ‘a sense of coming home that made no sense’ as she’d been born thousands of miles away. Now she has come back to take up a job in a remote community and once again feels her connection to this place, ‘the on and on of it. The ground so solid, the sky so sure.’

'In this extract, Amber is still on her way to the job in the remote community, but has been sidetracked by a football match, by giving rides to old friends – including Jennifer and her young daughter Shyanna – and a funeral. She has spent the night in Jennifer’s community, and needs to get moving again.' (Introduction)

'Elliot Perlman’s latest novel is a timely chronicle of lawyers and sexual harassment.'

'Laura Jean McKay’s novel asks us to see the world through animals’ eyes.'

'This week we’re delighted to bring you an extract from Imbi Neeme’s debut The Spill, winner of the 2019 Penguin Literary Prize and published just last month. It’s an absorbing novel about two sisters, and how differently each remembers the past.' (Introduction)

'SL Lim’s debut won this year’s UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and explores questions of race, religion and culture.'