AustLit

'Amanda Lohrey might be described as a writer’s writer: proficient in short and long form fiction and a veteran of the essay. Her writing is the literature of ideas.' (Introduction)

'The conceit of Kate Grenville’s ninth novel is that the author discovers a memoir written by Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of John Macarthur, the British army officer and pioneer of the Australian wool industry. Grenville acts as a “transcriber and editor” and in her foreword observes: “Australian history, like most histories, is mainly about men.” It is precisely this history that Elizabeth’s counter-narrative sets out to question.' (Introduction)

'In Exploded View, Carrie Tiffany sheds the ­bucolic settings of her two previous novels for Australian suburbia. Her narrator is an ­unnamed teenager who lives with her mother and brother in their new home with their mum’s new partner, “father man”.'  (Introduction)

'Time is fluid in Stephanie Bishop’s new novel Man Out of Time, an intimate portrait of a family breaking down. The narration is split between the points of view of Stella, her mother Frances, and her father Leon. Bishop captures the fluctuations of her characters’ consciousnesses so closely that the reader experiences narrative time in loops and layers as memories are uncovered and reintegrated into her characters’ thoughts. Leon is the man ‘out of time’ as he tries to salvage the family unit; his own perception of time is distorted by mental illness; and he ultimately runs out of time to save his own life.'  (Introduction)

'Interwoven short story collections are often at their best when they offer multiple perspectives on the same event. Laurie Steed does this well in his début novel You Belong Here, as he captures the life of a single family through the multiplicity of its members.' (Introduction)

'Children are the focus of Maxine Beneba Clarke’s choices in The Best Australian Stories 2017: children who disappear, children who are taken, children who never were. This theme unites the anthology so the stories speak softly to each other like whispers passed along a line.' (Introduction)

'In her 1996 essay 'The Art of the Dumb Question', Helen Garner recalls bragging to friend Tim Winton that she had written a 200-word 'syntact­ically perfect sentence'. 'He scorched me with a surfer’s stare,' she writes, 'and said, ‘I couldn’t care less about that sort of shit’.' It’s an illuminating anecdote about the differ­ent approaches taken by two of our great writers.' (Introduction)

'In Harriet McKnight’s début novel, a story about early onset dementia is offset by a second conservation-focused narrative involving the glossy black cockatoo. This braided structure immediately creates anticipation about where and how the two stories will meet.' (Introduction)