AustLit

'Helen Garner’s third and final volume of published diaries covers three years, from 1995 to 1998, during which her marriage to author Murray Bail finally broke down. As a diary – one, moreover, written by an author with an avid and democratic eye for telling detail – it is obedient to the unruliness of the form. This is a book assembled from perceptual flotsam and daily happenstance – gossip and anecdote, dreams and the weather, overheard dialogue and stray literary quotation.' (Introduction)

'The Crossroads Hotel in Casula has gained the kind of infamy that most venues in 2021 want to avoid. In June the hotel became ground zero for the Covid-19 outbreak in the multiracial, largely working-class area of south-west Sydney. The starkly different, militarised response to this outbreak, compared with those in the eastern suburbs, has arguably done more to entrench Sydney’s west–east divide than any other event in the city’s history.' (Introduction)

'Emily Bitto’s first novel since her 2015 Stella Prize-winning debut, The Strays, is the coming-of-age story of 22-year-old Will. It is 2011 and, reeling from a bad break-up, Will flees Melbourne for the United States in search of “experience” and “the grand American ideal of self-determination”.' (Introduction)