AustLit

'Tash and Joel are career paramedics, coming to the rescue of Adelaide residents of every class, culture and age. In a job where every day can bring death and violence, they maintain their sanity through a friendship built on black humour. But as the daily exposure to trauma begins to take its toll, both, in different ways, must fight to preserve their mental health and relationships – even with each other. How much pressure can Tash and Joel handle, and what happens when they finally crack?

'With each chapter revolving around an emergency – some frightening, some moving, some simply funny – The Application of Pressure is as tense as it is engaging. Digging beneath the shocking surface of gore and grit, Rachael Mead lays bare the humanity of emergency services personnel and their patients.

'Masterfully written, The Application of Pressure is a breathtaking and deeply humane debut novel that reveals not only the trauma of a life lived on the frontline of medicine, but also the essential, binding friendships that make such a life possible.' (Publication summary)

'The dangerous potential of leaping to conclusions is the backbone of Ross Watkins’ ambitious and deceptively clever debut novel for adults, The Apology. Using a cool, clear style, Watkins has created a suspenseful narrative in which the reader’s expectations are slowly chiseled away as the plot explodes anticipated versions of reality. The novel begins with a brief, untitled and anonymously voiced first page. This opening describes the titular apology and drip-feeds enough context so that, before the narrative even begins, we, as readers, have made various assumptions. The wily ambiguity of this introductory text is only evident as the plot accelerates towards the climax and the reader recognises their initial interpretations to have been dangerously simplistic.' (Introduction)

'This is an alive, refreshing and, quite literally, elemental book of water and skin, muscle and fire. Rachael Mead’s poems are immediate and grounded whilst entwined with fragility and struggle. They don’t shy from the difficulties and sadness as well as joy in human kinship. Along the way Mead offers us a clear-eyed self-consciousness of the human within the larger places of the earth, in this case places such as Antarctica, Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, Ikara–Flinders Ranges. The book offers us an embodied sense of secular ritual in its attentiveness and its use of form – lists, lyric iterations, admonitions - as the poet both argues and confides with herself and us, about the wild pleasures of earth’s physical and emotional topographies, and of our responsibilities within all this. A powerful and invigorating book of journeys well worth taking.

'JILL JONES'