AustLit

'A small boy was walking along a bush track, hands stuck in his pockets, lips puckered in a whistle. Sunlight streamed through the leaves, dappling his path. His presence disturbed a flock of corellas, and they burst into the air, wheeling and whirring. The boy watched appreciatively, canting his head, shading his eyes, and continued on his way, until he came to a log. He stepped over i, taking his hands out of his pockets, angling his body, for it was a large log. The snake struck with impersonal dispatch.' (Introduction)

'In 1970 Kate Jennings, twenty-one, stunned a Sydney anti-war rally with a pull-no-punches speech that put "women's lib" on the map. Brave, impassioned and searing, the speech set the tone for the idiosyncratic career that was to follow. A few years later, she was on her way to New York, where she would make her name as a writer and enjoy a ringside seat at some of the most confronting events of our time.

'Trouble collects Jennings's best work from the last four decades. With a polemical anger tempered by a keen sense of the absurd and a fiercely independent streak, she writes incisively about politics, morality, finance, feminism and the writing life. She describes America with the keen eye of an outsider and looks back at Australia with an expatriate's frankness.

'Trouble is both an unconventional autobiography and a record of remarkable times. From the protest movements of the 1970s, via Wall Street's heyday and dramatic collapse, to the historic election of Barack Obama, Jennings captures the shifts - seismic and subtle, personal and political - that brought us to where we are now. After four decades, Kate Jennings' work is as exhilarating and impossible to categorise - shocking with the shock of recognition - as the day it was written.' (From the publisher's website.)

Watching the film Wake in Fright nearly 40 years after its release - 1971 - brought back one good memory for me of life in the bush. Canvas water bags. Nothing like the taste of water from those bags: sweet and earthy. One hangs on the back of a door in the shambles of a mining shack occupied by Doc Tydon, the movie's supposed villain. Not that anyone in the movie drinks water. Heaven forbid. Instead they neck beer and, in the case of Doc Tydon, glug down whiskey in the legendary quantities typical of men on a weekend bender in the Outback. Typical, I should also emphasise, of men the world over who work in isolated areas under punishing conditions, although the pursuit of the Holy Grail of alcoholic oblivion in the Outback is undertaken with an inexorable determination, not so much blunting pain as getting their due. Cracking a few cold ones with your mates - legacy, birthright, entitlement.

'"Because Stanley came into my life in 2001 and Sophie in 2004, this is a tale, tangentially, about Manhattan in those first confounding years of the new millennium. Years when our lives were a rhubarb of noisy emotion: a devil's chorus of fear, blatting rage, birring anxiety, tweedling incredulity, roupy sorrow."

'Stanley and Sophie is a book that woofs. Ostensibly an animal book, it's about two beloved border terriers in New York City and two monkeys in Bali. It is also a book about terrorism, about grieving, about finding one's way through sadness, and about remaking a life.' (Libraries Australia)