AustLit

'Sometimes a book has a mysterious power over readers. Conventionally the power is explained by theme, plot, character, narrative, style. This chapter, written by a novelist using an interdisciplinary approach, draws on the work of turn-of-the century neuroscientist John Briggs and more recently neuroscientist Professor Liane Gabora to look at a book’s power from a creator’s point of view. Apart from “just scribbling”, the reason for creating a book is not apparent to this novelist at first, but appears gradually during the writing as “an inkling” with multidimensional “fingerprints” of style and voice, and towards the end of the creation, feels to her as affirming, authentic and ultimately, healing. This healing may be contagious, and sensed by the reader. In the following chapter, the novelist describes the creating of her new unpublished but commissioned novel when the inkling refused to arrive; and how she had to – in Heidegger’s words – “wait upon” it, rather than “wait for” it.'

Source: Abstract.

'Do You Love Me or What? is a collection of eight sparkling, nuanced short stories from one of Australia’s most celebrated and loved writers. Written in elegant, shimmering prose, Sue’s stories are woven with themes encompassing love, loss and yearning, memory and identity, the desert and water, and people who live on the periphery of society. Her sentences are spare and evocative, yet paint fully realised pictures that speak of the poignant, shared experiences of the nature of relationships, past and present.'

'Kate, a lonely city woman and reluctant student, is asked by her teachers to travel to the middle of the Australian desert to record a dying Aboriginal woman singing an ancient song. She accepts because she believes that she might be able to reunite with a childhood love and solve the mystery of her past.

But once there, she′s confronted by an Aboriginal culture vastly different to her own, and also by the forceful personality of the man who is supposed to help her find the singer. Very soon she is questioning everything she has ever felt about her own country and about her childhood.

Sensitively portrayed, lyrical, and filled with powerful insights about different people′s sense of home and belonging and family, The Oldest Song in the World is a brave and controversial story about discovering the power of one′s own voice and taking care to pay attention to the voice of others.' Source: http://www.harpercollins.com.au/ (Sighted 09/07/2012)

'There's a precise moment when you fall in love. If you're watchful and if you happen to be gazing at the person before that moment, during it, and afterwards, you actually see them change before your eyes... Their faces change their bodies change, their very bones dissolve to align themselves anew... You laugh at yourself, but underneath there seems a greater truth, that before, you saw them imperfectly, and now you see them as they truly are. So you become their hostage.

'This is the story of Eva, the cleaning lady in a small Australian scientific laboratory. No one from the lab remembers her as the junior technician who worked there years ago, and no one knows she is on a secret mission to discover a cure for her autistic child.

'The only one who knows the full story is reclusive Owen, and he's not telling anyone because he knows there's no honour in spying.

'But the day he saw Eva at the hospital was the day his life changed forever...

'The Secret Cure is a profoundly moving novel which explores new ways of what it means to be human, to be normal, to be honourable, to discover, and above all what it means to love.'

(Source: cover)