AustLit

'UWA Publishing welcomes the return of Australia's most gifted and prodigious poet, Francis Webb, whose work has been out of print for thirty years in collected form.

'This collection of Francis Webb's poems is the first edition to incorporate Webb's final changes - previously ignored by editors - to several of his poems written in 1969.

'Webb wrote on varied subjects: the sea, postwar Australian cities, mental illness, colonial histories as well as religious and political figures, including St Francis and Hitler.

'His poems are written in a range of styles, from humorous short verse to epics and radio plays.

'The book is introduced by award-winning poet Toby Davidson and accompanied by 100 pages of notes drawing on the latest scholarship and commentaries.'

Source: UWA media release, February 2011, http://www.uwap.uwa.edu.au/
Sighted: 01/03/2011

'Growing up just as the first pastoralists were cutting a swathe through his native lands, Jandamarra is one of Australia's great tragic heroes. Station child, angry young man, police tracker of his own people and finally inspirational leader of the most successful indigenous resistance against white settlement, his life was lived on the jagged edge of change and uncertainty. This story belongs the the Bunuba people of the Kimberley-but it speaks to everyone. (Source: Publisher)

'Some of the best, most significant writing produced in Australia over more than two centuries is gathered in this landmark anthology. Covering all genres - from fiction, poetry and drama to diaries, letters, essays and speeches - the anthology maps the development of one of the great literatures in English in all its energy and variety.

'The writing reflects the diverse experiences of Australians in their encounter with their extraordinary environment and with themselves. This is literature of struggle, conflict and creative survival. It is literature of lives lived at the extremes, of frontiers between cultures, of new dimensions of experience, where imagination expands.

'This rich, informative and entertaining collection charts the formation of an Australian voice that draws inventively on Indigenous words, migrant speech and slang, with a cheeky, subversive humour always to the fore. For the first time, Aboriginal writings are interleaved with other English-language writings throughout - from Bennelong's 1796 letter to the contemporary flowering of Indigenous fiction and poetry - setting up an exchange that reveals Australian history in stark new ways.

'From vivid settler accounts to haunting gothic tales, from raw protest to feisty urban satire and playful literary experiment, from passionate love poetry to moving memoir, the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature reflects the creative eloquence of a society.

'Chosen by a team of expert editors, who have provided illuminating essays about their selections, and with more than 500 works from over 300 authors, it is an authoritative survey and a rich world of reading to be enjoyed.' (Publisher's blurb)

Allen and Unwin have a YouTube channel with a number of useful videos on the Anthology.

'"There were only eleven of them, like eleven sisters all the same age in a large family. Because it was such a very small class, they had a very small classroom, which was perched at the very top of the school - up four flights of stairs, up in the high sky, like a colony of little birds nesting on a cliff. 'Today, girls,' said Miss Renshaw, 'we shall go out into the beautiful Gardens and think about death."'

'In the Gardens they meet a poet. What follows is inexplicable, shocking, a scandal. What really happened that day? Is 'the truth' as elusive as it seems? And do the little girls know more than they are letting on?' (From the publisher's website.)

'A novel of the cruelty of war, and tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love.

'August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.

'This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.' (Publisher's blurb)

Swallow the Air follows the life of 15-year-old May Gibson, an Aboriginal girl from New South Wales whose mother commits suicide. May and her brother go to live with their aunt, but eventually May travels further afield, first to Redfern's Block in Sydney, then to the Northern Territory, and finally into central New South Wales. She travels to escape, but also in pursuit of a sense of her own history, family, and identity.

The Turning comprises seventeen overlapping stories of second thoughts and mid-life regret set in the brooding small-town world of coastal Western Australia. Here are turnings of all kinds - changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, sudden detours - where people struggle against the terrible weight of the past and challenge the lives they've made for themselves.

These elegiac stories examine the darkness and frailty of ordinary people and celebrate the moments when the light shines through.

'She knew this.

That philematology is the science of kissing.

That Samuel Langhorne Clemens is better known as Mark Twain.

That, originally, gold comes from the stars.

'Madeleine Tully lives in Cambridge, England, the World - a city of spires, Isaac Newton and Auntie's Tea Shop.

'Elliot Baranski lives in Bonfire, the Farms, the Kingdom of Cello - where seasons roam, the Butterfly Child sleeps in a glass jar, and bells warn of attacks from dangerous Colours.

'They are worlds apart - until a crack opens up between them; a corner of white - the slim seam of a letter.

'Elliot begins to write to Madeleine, the Girl-in-the-World - a most dangerous thing to do for suspected cracks must be reported and closed.

'But Elliot's father has disappeared and Madeleine's mother is sick. Can a stranger from another world help to unravel the mysteries in your own?

'Can Madeleine and Elliot find the missing pieces of themselves before it is too late?

'A mesmerising story of two worlds; the cracks between them, the science that binds them and the colours that infuse them.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

'Michael’s older brother dies at the beginning of the summer he turns 15, but as its title suggests The Incredible Here and Now is a tale of wonder, not of tragedy. Presented as a series of vignettes, in the tradition of Sandra Cisneros’ Young Adult classic The House on Mango Street, it tells of Michael’s coming of age in a year which brings him grief and romance; and of the place he lives in Western Sydney where ‘those who don’t know any better drive through the neighbourhood and lock their car doors’, and those who do, flourish in its mix of cultures. Through his perceptions, the reader becomes familiar with Michael’s community and its surroundings, the unsettled life of his family, the girl he meets at the local pool, the friends that gather in the McDonalds parking lot at night, the white Pontiac Trans Am that lights up his life like a magical talisman. Suitable for young readers from 14 years of age.' (Publisher's blurb)

'On remote Rollrock Island, the sea-witch Misskaella discovers she can draw a girl from the heart of a seal. So, for a price, any man might buy himself a bride; an irresistibly enchanting sea-wife. But what cost will be borne by the people of Rollrock - the men, the women, the children - once Misskaella sets her heart on doing such a thing?'

Source: Publisher's website.

'An authoritative survey of Australian Aboriginal writing over two centuries, across a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. Including some of the most distinctive writing produced in Australia, it offers rich insights into Aboriginal culture and experience...

'The anthology includes journalism, petitions and political letters from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as major works that reflect the blossoming of Aboriginal poetry, prose and drama from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Literature has been used as a powerful political tool by Aboriginal people in a political system which renders them largely voiceless. These works chronicle the ongoing suffering of dispossession, but also the resilience of Aboriginal people across the country, and the hope and joy in their lives.' (Publisher's blurb)

Swallow the Air follows the life of 15-year-old May Gibson, an Aboriginal girl from New South Wales whose mother commits suicide. May and her brother go to live with their aunt, but eventually May travels further afield, first to Redfern's Block in Sydney, then to the Northern Territory, and finally into central New South Wales. She travels to escape, but also in pursuit of a sense of her own history, family, and identity.

'‘She’s going now,’ said Henry Watter if he said anything at all. Or, ‘It’s a tricky place, the world. You’ve got to be sharp to manage it.’‘Leave her be. She’ll be back,’ said Mrs Watter. ‘This is her home. She knows that.’

Lark Watter had always planned to run away from her stifling suburban life in 1960s Sydney. At university she encounters an American, Tom, and with him the promise of escape. Following Tom to the other side of the world by freighter is a journey to freedom—but the adventure Lark has embarked on isn’t quite what she had anticipated. Not on the way there, and certainly not in New York…

A picaresque journey across the high seas and through the extremes of the ’60s, Dancing on Coral was Glenda Adams’ second novel and established her international reputation. (Publisher's blurb)

'With humane irony the Western Australian poet, Jack Davis gives a painful insight into the process of colonisation and the transformation of his people.'

'The Dreamers is the story of a country-town family and old Uncle Worru, who in his dying days, recedes from urban hopelessness to the life and language of the Nyoongah spirit which in him has survived 'civilisation'.' (Currency Press website)

'Lauren is a curator at the National Aboriginal Gallery in Canberra. She's good at her job, passionate about the Arts, and takes work seriously. It's easy for Lauren to focus on work, that is, when she's not focussing on Adam.

Lauren is smitten with, or as her friends say, obsessed with Adam - the halfback for the Canberra Cockatoos. But Adam is a player, on and off the field. To everyone other than Lauren, it is clear that Adam doesn't want to be in a relationship at all, even though he likes being with Lauren. In a few short months Adam is involved in one too many scandals that make the press. She is shattered and breaks it off though she can't quite let go...

When she tries to convince her friends that she is waiting for Adam to have his epiphany and realise they are meant to be together, her friends decide to do an intervention on her. Under pressure from them, Lauren successfully applies for her dream job at the Smithsonian in New York. She leaves for the Big Apple, telling herself, that Adam will miss her so much he will see the light and eventually come begging.

Once landing in NYC, Lauren's life goes into overdrive with the preparation of the exhibition, finding her way around the city and marvelling at the city that never sleeps.

There are a lot of men in New York who flirt with Lauren, in fact, there are men everywhere. In the street, on the subway, in cafes and restaurants, in Central Park and even in her apartment building. They really like her, and they LOVE her accent. They fuss over her and just like being around her. Adam had never really been like that with her at all. She goes on dates trying to get Adam out of her system and eventually starts to think that she might never have another boyfriend again, because it is much more fun, and better for her self-esteem to be single in New York.

But when Adam appears on her doorstep six months later, having apparently had the epiphany she was waiting for, Lauren is confused. Adam says he wants her back. He catches Lauren at a weak moment - the exhibition she has been working on is complete and she has to make some big decisions: The Man or Manhattan?' (From the publisher's website.)

'do you remember the water buffalo at the end of our street?

or the deep-sea diver we found near the underpass?

do you know why dogs bark in the middle of the night?

Shaun Tan, creator of The Arrival, The Lost Thing and The Red Tree, reveals the quiet mysteries of everyday life: homemade pets, dangerous weddings, stranded sea mammals, tiny exchange students and secret rooms filled with darkness and delight.'

Source: Back cover.

'Liza used to say that she saw her past life as a string of roughly-graded balls, and so did Hilda have a linear conception of hers, thinking of it as a track with detours. But for some years now I have likened mine to a globe suspended in my head, and ever since the shocking realisation that waste is irretrievalbe, I have been careful not to let this globe spin to expose the nether side on which my marriage has left its multitude of images.

'Nora Porteous has spent most of her life waiting to escape. Fleeing from her small-town family and then from her stifling marriage to a mean-spirited husband, Nora arrives finally in London where she creates a new life for herself as a successful dressmaker.

'Now in her seventies, Nora returns to Queensland to settle into her childhood home.

'But Nora has been away a long time, and the people and events of her past are not at all like she remembered them. And while some things never change, Nora is about to discover just how selective her 'globe of memory' has been.

'Tirra Lirra by the River is a moving account of one woman's remarkable life, a beautifully written novel which displays the lyrical brevity of Jessica Anderson's award-winning style.' (Publication summary)

'UWA Publishing welcomes the return of Australia's most gifted and prodigious poet, Francis Webb, whose work has been out of print for thirty years in collected form.

'This collection of Francis Webb's poems is the first edition to incorporate Webb's final changes - previously ignored by editors - to several of his poems written in 1969.

'Webb wrote on varied subjects: the sea, postwar Australian cities, mental illness, colonial histories as well as religious and political figures, including St Francis and Hitler.

'His poems are written in a range of styles, from humorous short verse to epics and radio plays.

'The book is introduced by award-winning poet Toby Davidson and accompanied by 100 pages of notes drawing on the latest scholarship and commentaries.'

Source: UWA media release, February 2011, http://www.uwap.uwa.edu.au/
Sighted: 01/03/2011

This ground-breaking anthology collects poems written by Australian poets who are migrants, their children, and refugees of Asian heritage, spanning work that covers over three decades of writing. Inclusive of hitherto marginalised voices, these poems explore the hyphenated and variegated ways of being Asian Australian, and demonstrate how the different origins and traditions transplanted from Asia have generated new and different ways of being Australian. This anthology highlights the complexity of Asian Australian interactions between cultures and languages, and is a landmark in a rich, diversely-textured and evolving story. Timely and proactive this anthology fills existing cultural gaps in poetic expressions of home, travel, diaspora, identity, myth, empire and language. [from Trove]

'Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a naïve young woman. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Voss sets out to cross the continent. As hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases. Laura, waiting in Sydney, moves through the months of separation as if they were a dream and Voss the only reality.

'From the careful delineation of Victorian society to the sensitive rendering of hidden love to the stark narrative of adventure in the Australian desert, Patrick White's novel is a work of extraordinary power and virtuosity.'

Source: Random House Books (Sighted 21/09/2012)

'Friendship is a slippery notion. We lose friends as we change and our friends don't, or as we form other alliances, or as we betray our friends or are ourselves betrayed ...

'Alice, Hartley, Mitsy and Jamie are kids growing up in Broome before the Second World War. Their lives, although very different, are bound by friendship. Hartley and Alice Penrose are the children of an uneducated pearling master and a cultivated, disgruntled mother. Mitsy Sennosuke is Japanese, the daughter of Zeke, a diver working for Hartley and Alice's father, and Sadako, who makes soy sauce in a tin shed factory. Jamie Kilian is the son of a local magistrate, recently moved north from the city. Together, they unconsciously cross the boundaries of class and race, as they swim, joke and watch films in the cinema in Sheba Lane.

'But these happy, untroubled times end when lives are lost in a terrible cyclone, Alice falls for a wealthy cattleman pilot, a young woman is assaulted, and Hartley and Jamie compete for the love of Mitsy. The Second World War brings further strain into their lives. The four friends are no longer children but old enough to fight for their country. As Japanese bombs begin to fall like silver rain on northern Australia, loyalties are divided and friendships take on an altogether different form …

'This thrilling and beautifully written new novel from Garry Disher evokes an era of Australia caught up in the events of war and its effects on people torn apart from all they know and hold dear in childhood.' (Source: Publisher's website)

'My Place, the classic Australian picture book, is a "time machine" which takes the reader back into the past. It depicts the history of one particular piece of land in Sydney from 1788 to 1988 through the stories of the various children who have lived there. It aims to teach the reader about the history of Australia, about families, settlers, multiculturalism, and the traditional owners of the land. Each child's story covers a decade in time, showing their particular dress, customs and family life.

'The book also features maps that the successive generations of children have 'drawn' which demonstrate the things that have changed - as well as the things that have remained constant. My Place ultimately aims to show "that everyone is part of History" and that "every place has a story as old as the earth".' -- Provided by publisher (2008 ed.)

'In Town, James Roy turns his hand to the short story, using it to explore the lives of the young residents of an Australian town. This town doesn't have a name. But if it seems familiar, it's because we recognise the people who walk its streets.

'From the serendipity of an unexpected moment of connection, to the sadness of leaving home, and the pain of the desperate decisions we make, these stories take a personal and uncompromising look at life. Love and loss, grief, humour and passion. Hope and hopelessness. Thirteen linked short stories, spanning a year in the lives of thirteen young people, from a town near you.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Every city, town and village has its memorial to war. Nowhere are these more eloquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles - from Gallipoli and the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. In THE GREAT WORLD, his finest novel yet, David Malouf gives a voice to that experience. But THE GREAT WORLD is more than a novel of war. Ranging over seventy years of Australian life, from Sydney's teeming King's Cross to the tranquil backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, it is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and lost innocence, of survival and witness.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Vintage reprint).

'Families can detonate. Some families are torn apart forever by one small act, one solitary mistake. In my family it was a series of small explosions; consistent, passionate, pathetic. Cruel words, crude threats... We spurred each other on till we reached a crescendo of pain and we retired exhausted to our rooms, in tears or in fury.

'Ari is nineteen, unemployed and a poofter who doesn't want to be gay. He is looking for something - anything - to take him away from his aimless existence in suburban Melbourne. He doesn't believe in anyone or anything, except the power of music. All he wants to do is dance, take drugs, have sex and change the world.

'For Ari, all the orthodoxies of family, sex, politics and work have collapsed. Caught between the traditional Greek world of his parents and friends and the alluring, destructive world of clubs, chemicals and anonymous sex, all Ari can do is ease his pain in the only ways he knows how.

'Written in stark, uncompromising prose, Loaded is a first novel of great passion and power.' (From the publisher's website.)

Swallow the Air follows the life of 15-year-old May Gibson, an Aboriginal girl from New South Wales whose mother commits suicide. May and her brother go to live with their aunt, but eventually May travels further afield, first to Redfern's Block in Sydney, then to the Northern Territory, and finally into central New South Wales. She travels to escape, but also in pursuit of a sense of her own history, family, and identity.

The Turning comprises seventeen overlapping stories of second thoughts and mid-life regret set in the brooding small-town world of coastal Western Australia. Here are turnings of all kinds - changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, sudden detours - where people struggle against the terrible weight of the past and challenge the lives they've made for themselves.

These elegiac stories examine the darkness and frailty of ordinary people and celebrate the moments when the light shines through.

'Harry Hodby lives in a sleepy town on the bend of a sluggish river in Australia. Harry spends most of his time swimming in Pearce Swamp, eating watermelon with his brother and dad, escaping schoolyard bullies, being in love with the secretary, and racing through butterflies in Cowpers Paddock. But life in this small river town isn't always easy. Harry's mother died when he was seven, and his friend Linda was swept away in a flood. Harry yearns to leave town even though he knows that people who get away never come back. His father has told him how to get out of town, but there's a mystery that he needs to solve before he can go...'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Front Street ed.)

'When Fan was little she dreamed of magical countries in the far away blue hills. As she grew up she dreamed of love, and the boys came after her one by one by one.

'Clementine thought her cousin Fan's house in the country had a special smell: of sun and dust and kerosene and the wild honey they ate for breakfast on their toast. But then there were the feelings: the anger that smelled like iron and the disappointment that smelled like mud. Fan was strong and beautiful and Clementine thought she'd always be like that.

'But Fan was seeking something, and neither she nor Clementine knew exactly what... With sharp poetic prose, insight and compassion, Judith Clarke tells a moving and beautiful story as she traces the lives of two young women, separated by circumstance, but linked forever by blood and friendship.' (Publisher's blurb)

'An authoritative survey of Australian Aboriginal writing over two centuries, across a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. Including some of the most distinctive writing produced in Australia, it offers rich insights into Aboriginal culture and experience...

'The anthology includes journalism, petitions and political letters from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as major works that reflect the blossoming of Aboriginal poetry, prose and drama from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Literature has been used as a powerful political tool by Aboriginal people in a political system which renders them largely voiceless. These works chronicle the ongoing suffering of dispossession, but also the resilience of Aboriginal people across the country, and the hope and joy in their lives.' (Publisher's blurb)

'An authoritative survey of Australian Aboriginal writing over two centuries, across a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. Including some of the most distinctive writing produced in Australia, it offers rich insights into Aboriginal culture and experience...

'The anthology includes journalism, petitions and political letters from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as major works that reflect the blossoming of Aboriginal poetry, prose and drama from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Literature has been used as a powerful political tool by Aboriginal people in a political system which renders them largely voiceless. These works chronicle the ongoing suffering of dispossession, but also the resilience of Aboriginal people across the country, and the hope and joy in their lives.' (Publisher's blurb)

'UWA Publishing welcomes the return of Australia's most gifted and prodigious poet, Francis Webb, whose work has been out of print for thirty years in collected form.

'This collection of Francis Webb's poems is the first edition to incorporate Webb's final changes - previously ignored by editors - to several of his poems written in 1969.

'Webb wrote on varied subjects: the sea, postwar Australian cities, mental illness, colonial histories as well as religious and political figures, including St Francis and Hitler.

'His poems are written in a range of styles, from humorous short verse to epics and radio plays.

'The book is introduced by award-winning poet Toby Davidson and accompanied by 100 pages of notes drawing on the latest scholarship and commentaries.'

Source: UWA media release, February 2011, http://www.uwap.uwa.edu.au/
Sighted: 01/03/2011

'With humane irony the Western Australian poet, Jack Davis gives a painful insight into the process of colonisation and the transformation of his people.'

'The Dreamers is the story of a country-town family and old Uncle Worru, who in his dying days, recedes from urban hopelessness to the life and language of the Nyoongah spirit which in him has survived 'civilisation'.' (Currency Press website)

'Alice Aigner is successful, independent and a confirmed serial dater - but at her ten-year school reunion she has a sudden change of heart. Bored rigid by her married, mortgaged and motherly former classmates, Alice decides to prove that a woman can have it all: a man, marriage, career, kids and a mind of her own.

'She sets herself a goal: meet the perfect man and marry him before her thirtieth birthday, just under two years away. Together with her best friends Dannie, Liza and Peta, Alice draws up a ten-point plan. Then, with a little help from her mum, her dad, her brothers, her colleagues and her neighbour across the hall, she sets out to find Mr Right. Unfortunately for Alice, it's not quite as easy as she imagines.

'Who could not fall in love with our Koori heroine as she dates (among others): Renan, whose career goal is to be the world's best moonwalker and male hula dancer; Tufu the commitment-phobic Samoan football player; scary Simon the one-night stand; and Paul - Mr Dreamboat, but perhaps too good to be true. All the while, Alice skilfully avoids dating Cliff, son of her mum's friend, a confirmed bachelor who isn't likely to settle down with a woman anytime soon.' (Publisher's blurb)

'do you remember the water buffalo at the end of our street?

or the deep-sea diver we found near the underpass?

do you know why dogs bark in the middle of the night?

Shaun Tan, creator of The Arrival, The Lost Thing and The Red Tree, reveals the quiet mysteries of everyday life: homemade pets, dangerous weddings, stranded sea mammals, tiny exchange students and secret rooms filled with darkness and delight.'

Source: Back cover.

'UWA Publishing welcomes the return of Australia's most gifted and prodigious poet, Francis Webb, whose work has been out of print for thirty years in collected form.

'This collection of Francis Webb's poems is the first edition to incorporate Webb's final changes - previously ignored by editors - to several of his poems written in 1969.

'Webb wrote on varied subjects: the sea, postwar Australian cities, mental illness, colonial histories as well as religious and political figures, including St Francis and Hitler.

'His poems are written in a range of styles, from humorous short verse to epics and radio plays.

'The book is introduced by award-winning poet Toby Davidson and accompanied by 100 pages of notes drawing on the latest scholarship and commentaries.'

Source: UWA media release, February 2011, http://www.uwap.uwa.edu.au/
Sighted: 01/03/2011

This ground-breaking anthology collects poems written by Australian poets who are migrants, their children, and refugees of Asian heritage, spanning work that covers over three decades of writing. Inclusive of hitherto marginalised voices, these poems explore the hyphenated and variegated ways of being Asian Australian, and demonstrate how the different origins and traditions transplanted from Asia have generated new and different ways of being Australian. This anthology highlights the complexity of Asian Australian interactions between cultures and languages, and is a landmark in a rich, diversely-textured and evolving story. Timely and proactive this anthology fills existing cultural gaps in poetic expressions of home, travel, diaspora, identity, myth, empire and language. [from Trove]

'Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a naïve young woman. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Voss sets out to cross the continent. As hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases. Laura, waiting in Sydney, moves through the months of separation as if they were a dream and Voss the only reality.

'From the careful delineation of Victorian society to the sensitive rendering of hidden love to the stark narrative of adventure in the Australian desert, Patrick White's novel is a work of extraordinary power and virtuosity.'

Source: Random House Books (Sighted 21/09/2012)

'Friendship is a slippery notion. We lose friends as we change and our friends don't, or as we form other alliances, or as we betray our friends or are ourselves betrayed ...

'Alice, Hartley, Mitsy and Jamie are kids growing up in Broome before the Second World War. Their lives, although very different, are bound by friendship. Hartley and Alice Penrose are the children of an uneducated pearling master and a cultivated, disgruntled mother. Mitsy Sennosuke is Japanese, the daughter of Zeke, a diver working for Hartley and Alice's father, and Sadako, who makes soy sauce in a tin shed factory. Jamie Kilian is the son of a local magistrate, recently moved north from the city. Together, they unconsciously cross the boundaries of class and race, as they swim, joke and watch films in the cinema in Sheba Lane.

'But these happy, untroubled times end when lives are lost in a terrible cyclone, Alice falls for a wealthy cattleman pilot, a young woman is assaulted, and Hartley and Jamie compete for the love of Mitsy. The Second World War brings further strain into their lives. The four friends are no longer children but old enough to fight for their country. As Japanese bombs begin to fall like silver rain on northern Australia, loyalties are divided and friendships take on an altogether different form …

'This thrilling and beautifully written new novel from Garry Disher evokes an era of Australia caught up in the events of war and its effects on people torn apart from all they know and hold dear in childhood.' (Source: Publisher's website)

'My Place, the classic Australian picture book, is a "time machine" which takes the reader back into the past. It depicts the history of one particular piece of land in Sydney from 1788 to 1988 through the stories of the various children who have lived there. It aims to teach the reader about the history of Australia, about families, settlers, multiculturalism, and the traditional owners of the land. Each child's story covers a decade in time, showing their particular dress, customs and family life.

'The book also features maps that the successive generations of children have 'drawn' which demonstrate the things that have changed - as well as the things that have remained constant. My Place ultimately aims to show "that everyone is part of History" and that "every place has a story as old as the earth".' -- Provided by publisher (2008 ed.)

'In Town, James Roy turns his hand to the short story, using it to explore the lives of the young residents of an Australian town. This town doesn't have a name. But if it seems familiar, it's because we recognise the people who walk its streets.

'From the serendipity of an unexpected moment of connection, to the sadness of leaving home, and the pain of the desperate decisions we make, these stories take a personal and uncompromising look at life. Love and loss, grief, humour and passion. Hope and hopelessness. Thirteen linked short stories, spanning a year in the lives of thirteen young people, from a town near you.' (Publisher's blurb)

'What really goes on inside a sentence? What is your subject, and where is your verb, and what is its tense, and where is your modifier, and why does it matter? Where do you need a comma, and where do you not? Why are dashes and semicolons so misunderstood? When is it which and when is it that? In The Little Green Grammar Book, Mark Tredinnick asks and answers the tough grammar questions—big and small—with the same verve and authority readers encountered in The Little Red Writing Book. The Little Green Grammar Book does for grammar what The Little Red Writing Book did for style. It will have you writing like a writer in no time.' (Publisher's blurb)

'The book is specifically designed for tertiary level students studying creative writing, though it can be used by the more general reader. It takes an experimental approach, stresses incremental strategies and uses literary and cultural theory to illuminate the process of writing. It includes many different types of writing, including fiction, poetry, mixed genre writing, writing for performance and writing for new media. Each chapter is illustrated with extensive student and published examples.'

(Source: information provided by Hazel Smith.)

'"There were only eleven of them, like eleven sisters all the same age in a large family. Because it was such a very small class, they had a very small classroom, which was perched at the very top of the school - up four flights of stairs, up in the high sky, like a colony of little birds nesting on a cliff. 'Today, girls,' said Miss Renshaw, 'we shall go out into the beautiful Gardens and think about death."'

'In the Gardens they meet a poet. What follows is inexplicable, shocking, a scandal. What really happened that day? Is 'the truth' as elusive as it seems? And do the little girls know more than they are letting on?' (From the publisher's website.)

'The book is specifically designed for tertiary level students studying creative writing, though it can be used by the more general reader. It takes an experimental approach, stresses incremental strategies and uses literary and cultural theory to illuminate the process of writing. It includes many different types of writing, including fiction, poetry, mixed genre writing, writing for performance and writing for new media. Each chapter is illustrated with extensive student and published examples.'

(Source: information provided by Hazel Smith.)

'"There were only eleven of them, like eleven sisters all the same age in a large family. Because it was such a very small class, they had a very small classroom, which was perched at the very top of the school - up four flights of stairs, up in the high sky, like a colony of little birds nesting on a cliff. 'Today, girls,' said Miss Renshaw, 'we shall go out into the beautiful Gardens and think about death."'

'In the Gardens they meet a poet. What follows is inexplicable, shocking, a scandal. What really happened that day? Is 'the truth' as elusive as it seems? And do the little girls know more than they are letting on?' (From the publisher's website.)

'The book is specifically designed for tertiary level students studying creative writing, though it can be used by the more general reader. It takes an experimental approach, stresses incremental strategies and uses literary and cultural theory to illuminate the process of writing. It includes many different types of writing, including fiction, poetry, mixed genre writing, writing for performance and writing for new media. Each chapter is illustrated with extensive student and published examples.'

(Source: information provided by Hazel Smith.)

'Hours after rejecting the Corrowa People's native title claim on Brisbane's Meston Park, Justice Bruce Brosnan is brutally murdered in his home. Days later, lawyers against the claim are also found dead.

Aboriginal people were once prohibited from entering Brisbane's city limits at night, and Meston Park stood on the boundary. The Corrowa's matriarch, Ethel Cobb, is convinced the murders are the work of an ancient assassin who has returned to destroy the boundary, but Aboriginal lawyer Miranda Eversely isn't so sure.

When the Premier is kidnapped, the pressure to find the killer intensifies ... While the investigation forces Detective Sergeant Jason Matthews to confront his buried heritage, Miranda battles a sense of personal failure at the Corrowa's defeat. How far will it take her to the edge of self-destruction?' Source: www.uqp.com.au/ (Sighted 25/03/2011).

'Alex Leefson is astronomy's glamour girl, in love with the satellite Europa and the equally unreachable Phoebe. Meanwhile, her husband Daniel mourns the demise of his marriage and his life. Full of Dorothy Porter's customary bite and sensuality, Wild Surmise is an engrossing duet between two passionately estranged voices. An intensely moving verse novel of passions and vulnerabilities, love and death.' (Publication summary)

Swallow the Air follows the life of 15-year-old May Gibson, an Aboriginal girl from New South Wales whose mother commits suicide. May and her brother go to live with their aunt, but eventually May travels further afield, first to Redfern's Block in Sydney, then to the Northern Territory, and finally into central New South Wales. She travels to escape, but also in pursuit of a sense of her own history, family, and identity.

The Turning comprises seventeen overlapping stories of second thoughts and mid-life regret set in the brooding small-town world of coastal Western Australia. Here are turnings of all kinds - changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, sudden detours - where people struggle against the terrible weight of the past and challenge the lives they've made for themselves.

These elegiac stories examine the darkness and frailty of ordinary people and celebrate the moments when the light shines through.

'Families can detonate. Some families are torn apart forever by one small act, one solitary mistake. In my family it was a series of small explosions; consistent, passionate, pathetic. Cruel words, crude threats... We spurred each other on till we reached a crescendo of pain and we retired exhausted to our rooms, in tears or in fury.

'Ari is nineteen, unemployed and a poofter who doesn't want to be gay. He is looking for something - anything - to take him away from his aimless existence in suburban Melbourne. He doesn't believe in anyone or anything, except the power of music. All he wants to do is dance, take drugs, have sex and change the world.

'For Ari, all the orthodoxies of family, sex, politics and work have collapsed. Caught between the traditional Greek world of his parents and friends and the alluring, destructive world of clubs, chemicals and anonymous sex, all Ari can do is ease his pain in the only ways he knows how.

'Written in stark, uncompromising prose, Loaded is a first novel of great passion and power.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Growing up just as the first pastoralists were cutting a swathe through his native lands, Jandamarra is one of Australia's great tragic heroes. Station child, angry young man, police tracker of his own people and finally inspirational leader of the most successful indigenous resistance against white settlement, his life was lived on the jagged edge of change and uncertainty. This story belongs the the Bunuba people of the Kimberley-but it speaks to everyone. (Source: Publisher)

Big-hearted, moving and richly rewarding, That Deadman Dance is set in the first decades of the 19th century in the area around what is now Albany, Western Australia. In playful, musical prose, the book explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers.

'The novel's hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful and eager to please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining them hunting whales, tilling the land, exploring the hinterland and establishing the fledgling colony. He is even welcomed into a prosperous local white family where he falls for the daughter, Christine, a beautiful young woman who sees no harm in a liaison with a native.

'But slowly - by design and by accident - things begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the colony is developing. Stock mysteriously start to disappear; crops are destroyed; there are "accidents" and injuries on both sides. As the Europeans impose ever stricter rules and regulations in order to keep the peace, Bobby's Elders decide they must respond in kind. A friend to everyone, Bobby is forced to take sides: he must choose between the old world and the new, his ancestors and his new friends. Inexorably, he is drawn into a series of events that will forever change not just the colony but the future of Australia...' (From the publisher's website.)

'"There were only eleven of them, like eleven sisters all the same age in a large family. Because it was such a very small class, they had a very small classroom, which was perched at the very top of the school - up four flights of stairs, up in the high sky, like a colony of little birds nesting on a cliff. 'Today, girls,' said Miss Renshaw, 'we shall go out into the beautiful Gardens and think about death."'

'In the Gardens they meet a poet. What follows is inexplicable, shocking, a scandal. What really happened that day? Is 'the truth' as elusive as it seems? And do the little girls know more than they are letting on?' (From the publisher's website.)

'Enjoyed by generations of young Australians since its publication in 1910, A Little Bush Maid is the ultimate, idyllic tale of an adventurous girl growing up in the Australian bush.

'Billabong, a large cattle and sheep property in the Australian countryside, is home to twelve-year-old Norah Linton, her widowed father and her older brother, Jim. Norah's prim and proper aunts, who live in the city, consider she is in danger of "growing up wild" - riding all over Billabong on her beloved pony, Bobs, helping with mustering, and joining in all the holiday fun when Jim and his friends come home from boarding school. A fishing trip results in unexpected drama when they discover a mysterious stranger camped in the bush. Who is this stranger and why is he there? Norah's resourcefulness is tested to the full!' (Publication summary : 2015 edition)

'Without doubt Judy was the worst of the seven, probably because she was the cleverest.'

'Her father, Captain Woolcot, found his vivacious, cheeky daughter impossible – but seven children were really too much for him and most of the time they ran wild at their rambling riverside home, Misrule.

'Step inside and meet them all – dreamy Meg, and Pip, daring Judy, naughty Bunty, Nell, Baby and the youngest, 'the General'. Come and share in their lives, their laughter and their tears.' (From the publisher's website.)

'"I remember when we lay together for the first time and I closed my eyes and felt the crackle of her dark hair between my fingers. She was all warmth and sparking light. When I was with her, my skin sighed that the centre of the world was precisely here."

'Anna is afraid she must be unlovable - until she meets Flynn. Together, the girls swim, eat banana cake, laugh and love. Some days Flynn is unreachable; other days she's at Anna's door - but when Anna discovers Flynn's secret, she wonders if she knows her at all.

'A beautifully crafted novel by award-winning author Joanne Horniman that explores the tension between the tender moments that pull people together and the secrets that push them apart.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Harry Hodby lives in a sleepy town on the bend of a sluggish river in Australia. Harry spends most of his time swimming in Pearce Swamp, eating watermelon with his brother and dad, escaping schoolyard bullies, being in love with the secretary, and racing through butterflies in Cowpers Paddock. But life in this small river town isn't always easy. Harry's mother died when he was seven, and his friend Linda was swept away in a flood. Harry yearns to leave town even though he knows that people who get away never come back. His father has told him how to get out of town, but there's a mystery that he needs to solve before he can go...'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Front Street ed.)

'One of the country's finest young cellists, 16 year-old Hugh Twycross has a very bright future. A future that has been mapped out by his parents, his teachers, by everybody, it seems, except Hugh Twycross.

'Hugh has a secret, though: he loves cars and he loves car racing. When his newly discovered grandfather, Poppy, asks him to go on a road trip to Uluru in his 1970 Holden HT Monaro, Hugh decides, for once in his life, to do the unexpected.

'As they embark on a journey into the vast and fierce landscape of the Australian interior, Hugh discovers that Poppy has a secret that will unravel both their lives and take them in a direction they never expected.'

'Uglies is set in a world in which everyone has an operation when they turn sixteen, making them supermodel beautiful. Big eyes, full lips, no one fat or skinny. You might think this is a good thing, but it’s not. Especially if you’re one of the Smokies, a bunch of radical teens who’ve decided they want to keep their own faces. (How anti-social of them.)'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'When Fan was little she dreamed of magical countries in the far away blue hills. As she grew up she dreamed of love, and the boys came after her one by one by one.

'Clementine thought her cousin Fan's house in the country had a special smell: of sun and dust and kerosene and the wild honey they ate for breakfast on their toast. But then there were the feelings: the anger that smelled like iron and the disappointment that smelled like mud. Fan was strong and beautiful and Clementine thought she'd always be like that.

'But Fan was seeking something, and neither she nor Clementine knew exactly what... With sharp poetic prose, insight and compassion, Judith Clarke tells a moving and beautiful story as she traces the lives of two young women, separated by circumstance, but linked forever by blood and friendship.' (Publisher's blurb)

'UWA Publishing welcomes the return of Australia's most gifted and prodigious poet, Francis Webb, whose work has been out of print for thirty years in collected form.

'This collection of Francis Webb's poems is the first edition to incorporate Webb's final changes - previously ignored by editors - to several of his poems written in 1969.

'Webb wrote on varied subjects: the sea, postwar Australian cities, mental illness, colonial histories as well as religious and political figures, including St Francis and Hitler.

'His poems are written in a range of styles, from humorous short verse to epics and radio plays.

'The book is introduced by award-winning poet Toby Davidson and accompanied by 100 pages of notes drawing on the latest scholarship and commentaries.'

Source: UWA media release, February 2011, http://www.uwap.uwa.edu.au/
Sighted: 01/03/2011