AustLit

'1960. The world is dancing on the edge of revolution, and nowhere more so than on the Greek island of Hydra, where a circle of poets, painters and musicians live tangled lives, ruled by the writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston, troubled king and queen of bohemia. Forming within this circle is a triangle: its points the magnetic, destructive writer Axel Jensen, his dazzling wife Marianne Ihlen, and a young Canadian poet named Leonard Cohen.

'Into their midst arrives teenage Erica, with little more than a bundle of blank notebooks and her grief for her mother. Settling on the periphery of this circle, she watches, entranced and disquieted, as a paradise unravels.

'Burning with the heat and light of Greece, A Theatre for Dreamers is a spellbinding novel about utopian dreams and innocence lost – and the wars waged between men and women on the battlegrounds of genius.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A compulsive, note-perfect debut for fans of The Virgin Suicides and Picnic at Hanging Rock

''We lost all three girls that summer. Let them slip away like the words of some half-remembered song and when one came back, she wasn't the one we were trying to recall to begin with.'

'Tikka Molloy was eleven and one-sixth years old during the long hot summer of 1992, growing up in a distant suburb in Australia surrounded by encroaching bushland. That summer, the hottest on record, was when the Van Apfel sisters – Hannah, the beautiful Cordelia and Ruth – mysteriously disappeared during the school's Showstopper concert, held at the outdoor amphitheatre by the river.  Did they run away? Were they taken?  While the search for the sisters unites the small community, the mystery of their disappearance has never been solved.

'Now, years later, Tikka has returned home, to try to make sense of that strange moment in time. The summer that shaped her.  The girls that she never forgot. 

'Brilliantly observed, spiky, sharp, funny and unexpectedly endearing, The Van Apfel Girls are Gone is part mystery, part coming-of-age story – with a dark shimmering unexplained absence at its heart. '  (Publication summary)

''If this was a dream, then he wanted to know when it would end. Maybe it would end if he went to see Lydia. But it was the one thing he was not allowed to do.'...

Arky Swann is a film composer in New York separated from his wife, who has made him promise to keep a terrible secret. One day he finds his way to The Atrium at MOMA and sees Marina Abramovic in her performance The Artist is Present. The performance continues for seventy-five days and, as it unfolds, so does Arky as he considers marriage, art and the nature of commitment and love over a long-term union. The Museum of Modern Love is the story of one of the world's greatest art events and a man in search of connection.' (Publication summary)

'...An aging band on the verge, the Tall Poppies were still looking for their big break in the crapshoot known as the music business. So when their drummer was gunned down right in the middle of the video - and the murder caught on camera - they weren't too unhappy about seeing themselves on TV screens all around the world. Our heroine, Rachel Ganelli, self-confessed band moll (and witness to the shooting), had headed for Australia to escape a pending marriage, a mundane job, and her endlessly meddling parents. But finding herself on the perimeter of the murder, she heeds her mother's advice, just this once, and returns to New York, where life is more predictable. Or so she expects. Before she even has time to take a deep breath of city air, Rachel's sense of what really happened back in Australia spins wildly out of control - and Rachel's life right along with it....' (Slip cover of the American edition.)

Laurie Gwen Shapiro's unfortunately titled but endearingly quirky first novel, The Unexpected Salami ..., is a 1990's screwball comedy told in alternating chapters by two dysfunctional characters: a spoiled, neurotic, misanthropic New Yorker named Rachel Ganelli and her 'quasi boyfriend', Colin Dunforton, an ageing Aussie bass player. While in Australia, rooming with the members of a less-than-talented band called the Tall Poppies, Rachel witnesses the apparent mob execution of the Poppies' heroin-addicted ex-drummer, Stuart, during the shooting of a rock video. When she runs back to new York to escape questioning (which would have tipped off the authorities to her long-expired visa), she is astonished to find the dead man ordering a tuna on rye at Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop. It seems 'the hit' was staged by the band in order to boost its sagging fortunes. And the scheme works. In no time at all, Colin and the Tall Poppies have a recording contract with a major label and are booked to tour the United States. ... despite the risks, The Unexpected Salami winds up being unexpectedly delightful. Anthony Bourdain. (The New York Times (7 June 1998): BR22).