AustLit

'Salt Creek is set in the Coorong in the 1850s: a remote, beautiful and inhospitable coastal region in the new province of South Australia, which has been opened to graziers willing to chance their luck. Among them are Stanton Finch and his family, including sixteen-year-old Hester Finch.

'Once wealthy political activists, the Finch family has fallen on hard times. Cut adrift from the polite society they were raised to be part of, Hester and her siblings make connections where they can: with the travellers passing along the nearby stock route - among them a young artist, Charles - and the Ngarrindjeri people they have dispossessed. Hester witnesses the destruction of their subtle culture and begins to wonder what civilization is. Was it for this life and this world that she was educated?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'"There were only eleven of them, like eleven sisters all the same age in a large family. Because it was such a very small class, they had a very small classroom, which was perched at the very top of the school - up four flights of stairs, up in the high sky, like a colony of little birds nesting on a cliff. 'Today, girls,' said Miss Renshaw, 'we shall go out into the beautiful Gardens and think about death."'

'In the Gardens they meet a poet. What follows is inexplicable, shocking, a scandal. What really happened that day? Is 'the truth' as elusive as it seems? And do the little girls know more than they are letting on?' (From the publisher's website.)

'At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own.

'This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the event.

'In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century. The Slap is told from the points of view of eight people who were present at the barbecue. The slap and its consequences force them all to question their own families and the way they live, their expectations, beliefs and desires.

'What unfolds is a powerful, haunting novel about love, sex and marriage, parenting and children, and the fury and intensity - all the passions and conflicting beliefs - that family can arouse. In its clear-eyed and forensic dissection of the ever-growing middle class and its aspirations and fears, The Slap is also a poignant, provocative novel about the nature of loyalty and happiness, compromise and truth.' (Publisher's blurb)

'The Mitchell family has run a prosperous sheep farm for generations and the youngest daughter, Sally, has just turned 20. She rides to the hounds and leads an indulged life. That is, until she shocks her parents by becoming involved with an older man. Scandalised, they try to pack her off to England, but Sally doesn't make it. After a wild spree in Sydney she has cashed in her ticket and, hell bent on adventure, takes a job as a governess on a remote cattle station - Barra Creek - in the Gulf country of Cape York. Untamed and crocodile infested, it is a land of deserts, jungles and wide rivers. Then the great stations were run by men who were loners and women who had to cope or leave. Decades later, in 2003, Sally learns a secret that will change many lives - including her own - and leave readers horrified on one hand, and smiling and crying on the other.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

It's just another year of getting into strife at school and mucking around with his dog at home for Tas - until he meets Enya the new girl at his school. She is different from the others - cool and calm. She becomes a special friend to Tas. But the violence that Enya thought she had left behind in Northern Ireland catches up with her, and this in turn has a devastating effect on Tas. His life will never be the same again.

(Source: Trove)