AustLit

'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)

'A compelling tale of the slow disintegration of a relationship and the unravelling of a man.

'Tom and Clara are two struggling academics in their mid-thirties, who decide to take their first holiday in ten years. On the flight over to Indonesia, Tom experiences a debilitating panic attack, something he hasn't had in a long time, which he keeps hidden from Clara. At the resort, they meet Madeleine, a charismatic French woman, her Australian partner, Jeremy, and five-year-old son, Ollie, and the two couples strike up an easy friendship. The holiday starts to look up, even to Tom, who is struggling to get out of his own head. But when Clara and Madeleine become trapped in the maze-like grounds of the hotel during 'the fogging' - a routine spraying of pesticide - the dynamics suddenly shift between Tom and Clara, and the atmosphere of the holiday darkens.

'Told with equal parts compassion and irony, and brimming with observations that charm, illuminate, and devastate, The Fogging dives deep into what it means to be strong when your foundation is built on sand.' (Publication summary)

'The sixth and final novel of Steven Carroll’s Glenroy series takes us back to where this intergenerational saga begins, to Melbourne in 1917, and to Maryanne, a 40-year-old woman who is pregnant with an illegitimate child; a child who is “the egg from which a story would be hatched”.' (Introduction)