AustLit

'In the wake of Brittany Higgins's startling allegations of sexual abuse in Parliament House, Beejay Silcox revisits her review of Witness by award-winning journalist Louise Milligan. Witness (recently shortlisted in the 2021 Stella Prize) is an interrogative critique of the criminal trial process. It is the culmination of five years of research into how witnesses are treated (and often intimidated or worse) in court rooms.' (Production summary)

'With two stories and two front covers, the reader chooses where to start: in France in the past, or in a dystopian Australian future' 

'In her early 20s, Kathryn Heyman spent a season aboard a six-berth fishing trawler, Ocean Thief, that was scouring the Gulf of Carpentaria for tiger prawns. She’d hitchhiked up the coast from Sydney with a handful of clothes, a flick-knife she didn’t know how to use, and 10kg of books. It was an escape plan without a plan: “I had no deadline, no outcome, no-one waiting,” Heyman explains in Fury. “There was no-one to care for me, only myself, and I had never learned the lessons of caring.” She arrived on deck as Kacey, an untested galley cook who couldn’t fry an egg; she left as Kathryn, a toil-hardened deckhand. It was a transformation – a strengthening – that made other transformations possible.' (Introduction)

'Heiss’s indelible new novel is at once a joyful love story, a celebration of language, and an invitation to trace the old wounds of our history.'

'A tragic accident and a lifetime of trauma fuel this candid, thoughtful debut and examination of our tired ideas about manhood.'

'The first novel by this former speechwriter aims to provoke but its easy parodies of Australian politics are unlikely to elicit more than a shrug.;

'Gabrielle Carey’s new book about forgotten Australian novelist Elizabeth von Arnim is a much-needed antidote to the seriousness of modernist fiction, writes Beejay Silcox'

'On her deathbed, my grandmother wrote me a letter to be opened on my 18th birthday. When the time came, she was an echo of a memory; all that was left to miss was the idea of her. Yet there was an unexpected power in that long-waiting note with all its fervent, paper hopes. It was proof I had been precious to someone.' (Introduction)

'In this magical realist tale, Flanagan’s extinction metaphor is not subtle – but the fiction of the Anthropocene can’t afford to be.'

'In the Firth of Forth in Scotland’s east, a hulking lump of volcanic rock rises steeply from the water, an “igneous intrusion”. Known as Bass Rock, it’s the kind of geological anomaly that inspires anthropomorphizing. It menaces; it waits. In Evie Wyld’s new novel, The Bass Rock, the guano-white monolith has watched on for centuries as women have come to harm, murdered under its imperious shadow. It feels as if some dark power is loose – a vicious bedevilment – but Wyld’s point is far more terrifying: the rock has simply borne witness to ordinary life.' (Introduction)

'In the #MeToo movement’s early, giant-felling months, when every day seemed to yield a new scandal, with women across the globe uniting in anguish and fury, David Leser was shaken by his own obliviousness. “I thought I was awake to this rampaging male aggression,” he wrote at the time, “but the truth is I had absolutely no idea what women faced.” In the final days of an erratic 15-month relationship, Stephanie Wood could no longer ignore what some deep, limbic part of her brain had long suspected: her boyfriend was a conman, a pathological fantasist.' (Introduction)

Take your seats. There is a play, a drama of contained human collision, lurking under the surface of Charlotte Wood’s new novel, The Weekend.' (Introduction)