AustLit

'On the Sunday before Sydney’s lockdown tightened for the second time, my partner and I drove to Coogee Beach. We were there to see the ocean one last time before our range of movement contracted to a mere five kilometres; a restriction that would cut us off from the coast. Cases that day were in the 400s, and rising, and both of us knew there was little chance we would be allowed back before October at the earliest.' (Introduction)

'Garth Nix chats with fellow author James Bradley about his enthralling new historical fantasy, The Left-Handed Booksellers of London. This is a live recording of an online event hosted via Zoom during the Covid-19 crisis.'  (Production summary)

'In the middle of last year, I visited Hobart. Officially, I was there to help run a writing workshop; unofficially, I was there for a gathering organised by a philanthropist with an interest in the environment. The guest list was eclectic – some scientists, an artist who has been creating work from ocean plastics and her partner, a writer or two – but there was no agenda, no expectation of resolutions or outcomes. Instead, seated in an old building in Hobart’s city centre, we talked about our work, the world, the future, searching out points of connection and intersection, discussing ways of expressing and managing the fears we were all, in our different ways, grappling with.' (Introduction)

'I try to make sense of her sudden absence but every hour, every minute, brings some new and usually terrifying development.'

'How do writers address climate catastrophe, and where do they place climate within their fictional narratives? Two writers, Anne Charnock and James Bradley, face up to this challenge in novels published in 2020. They compare notes about their different approaches in this exchange of emails.' (Introduction)

'When scientist Kate Larkin joins a secretive project to re-engineer the climate by resurrecting extinct species she becomes enmeshed in another, even more clandestine program to recreate our long-lost relatives, the Neanderthals. But when the first of the children, a girl called Eve, is born, Kate cannot bear the thought her growing up in a laboratory, and so elects to abduct her, and raise her alone.

'Set against the backdrop of hastening climate catastrophe, Ghost Species is an exquisitely beautiful and deeply affecting exploration of connection and loss in an age of planetary trauma. For as Eve grows to adulthood she and Kate must face the question of who and what she is. Is she natural or artificial? Human or non-human? And perhaps most importantly, as civilisation unravels around them, is Eve the ghost species, or are we?

'James Bradley embeds Ghost Species with his deep and humane understanding of the natural world and a profound optimism, that together we can survive and thrive.' (Publication summary)

'Mark Brandi’s 2017 novel Wimmera was one of the most impressive debut Australian crime novels of recent years. A tautly constructed exploration of the corrosive effects of masculinity, it won the British Crime Writers Association’s Debut Dagger, was named the best debut at the Australian Indie Book Awards, and was shortlisted for several other accolades.' (Introduction)

'We inhabit a moment where reality seems increasingly ­malleable, a construct that serves the interests of the powerful by eliding and obscuring the truth. From police demanding journalists submit to fingerprinting to the rejection of science by lobby groups and politicians, the control and manipulation of information has become so normalised that most of the time we no longer even notice it.'(Introduction) 

'Last summer started early in Australia. In November a heatwave struck northern Queensland, pushing temperatures to record heights in many places. In Cairns the temperature reached 42.6 degrees, more than five degrees higher than the previous record for November. Over 12 days fire crews attended more than 1200 fires, including devastating blazes in rainforest areas that had always been regarded as natural firebreaks. In parts of Queensland, fire conditions were designated catastrophic, the first time the rating - which was only created in 2009 - had been used in the state.'  (Publication abstract)

'Andrew McGahan’s final book, The Rich Man’s House, opens with an apology. ‘It’s a finished novel – I wouldn’t be letting it out into the world if it wasn’t – but I can’t deny that my abrupt decline in health has forced the publishers and I to hurry the rewriting and editing process extremely, and that this is not quite the book it would have been had cancer not intervened … for once I can fairly plead – I was really going to fix that!’'  (Introduction)

'Last October, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature released the 2018 'Living Planet Report'. Published biennially since 1998, the report offers a comprehensive overview of ecosystems and biodiversity worldwide.'  (Publication abstract)

'On 15 May 1797 a fishing boat passing Wattamolla, in what is now Sydney’s Royal National Park, spotted three men on the beach. Rescued and returned to Sydney, the trio – tea merchant and supercargo William Clarke, sailor John Bennet, and Clarke’s lascar manservant, Srinivas – told an extraordinary story. After their ship, the Sydney Cove, was wrecked on Preservation Island in Bass Strait, they, along with fourteen other men, had set off in a longboat, hoping to fetch help for the other survivors. But when the longboat was also wrecked off the Ninety Mile Beach along Victoria, the survivors chose to do the only thing left open to them: follow the coast north on foot until they found help.'  (Introduction)

'Callie is deep in the Zone — exposed, broken and alone. Without her little sister Gracie. Without Matt, the boy she loves. But when she stumbles upon a secret - hidden deep within herself — she realises that she holds the key to defeating the Change. But the Change know this too and they will stop at nothing to capture her. Fleeing from the officers of Quarantine, and the pervasive Change, Callie finds refuge in the unlikeliest of places. Only to find that she is in more danger than ever before.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

'Recent years have seen the literary novel begin to mutate, its boundaries and subject matter evolving in new and sometimes surprising directions as it attempts to accommodate the increasing weirdness of the world we inhabit.' (Introduction)

'Aoife Clifford, James Bradley, DBC Pierre and Tegan Bennett Daylight talk about whether writers need mentors, what you should and shouldn't expect, and other writerly wisdom.'  (Publication abstract)

'One of the ironies of fiction is that the issues that feel most urgent are often those that are most resistant to successful fictional treatment.

'Why this should be is an interesting question, not least because our distaste for overtly political novels (and the tendency of writers to regard it as somewhat gauche) is a relatively recent phenomenon. Many of the greatest novels of the 19th and early 20th century are explicitly engaged with the issues of their day, and writers from Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo to Emile Zola and Thomas Hardy were fired by an often white-hot fury about social injustice.' (Introduction)