AustLit

''To live with someone for a long time requires an element of fiction – the selective use of facts to craft an ongoing story.'

'Amid the debris of her friends' relationships, Tess has a marriage that's comparatively unscathed. But she's at a hinge moment, poised between her present life and the one she decided against in her youth. What could she have made of her life had she chosen differently? And what will she risk to find out?

'Deceptively concise, The Girl with the Dogs is a masterful story about life from beginning to end, and about the brief moments of choice that have enduring consequences.' (Publication summary)

'Anna Funder's utterly compelling first novel All That I Am is about the heroic and largely tragic fate of a small group of left-wing German activists who opposed the rise of Hitler. It centres on two real people: the playwright Ernst Toller (famously eulogized by his friend W H Auden), and one of his associates, Ruth Koplowitz. Ruth was also a friend of Toller, and came to live in Sydney after WW2, where Anna got to know her well in later life. Their lives were tied together by the charismatic, passionate Dora - All That I Am vividly, passionately and irresistibly brings back to life their struggles, their hopes, their fears and their fates.'

Source: Penguin News, 6 October 2010
Sighted: 11/10/2010

'Anna Funder examines the nature of courage in a powerful and moving essay, commemorating the life and work of the "bravest of the brave", murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and other remarkable women who have stood up to totalitarian regimes at unthinkable cost to themselves.

'Australian history is full of images of ingenious settlers battling against the harsh, unforgiving land in order to survive. But is the European notion of 'survival' different from the indigenous one? Aboriginal writer Melissa Lucashenko argues eloquently and passionately that it is.

'Did the notion that "Greed is Good" die out with the 1980s? Perhaps at no other moment in living memory has greed played such a defining - and damning - role. At once clear-eyed and coruscating, Christopher Kremmer contemplates greed from all angles: social, historical, economic and cultural.

'Three brilliant essays written by leading and acclaimed Australian writers, commissioned by Sydney PEN, unflinchingly show us our world as never before.' (Publisher's blurb)