AustLit

'Eight Lives is a meticulously crafted first novel by Susan Hurley, a 2017 Peter Carey Short Story Award nominee and a medical researcher with more than thirty years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry. It’s an intricate thriller told in a multiple first-person style by friends, family, and associates of the late Dr David Tran, all of whom feel some responsibility for his horrific death.'  (Introduction)

'In Driving Into the Sun, Marcella Polain – winner of the Anne Elder Award, the Patricia Hackett Prize, and more – has done an excellent job of capturing the inner emotional landscape of a young girl growing up fatherless in Perth’s outer suburbia in the 1960s. She recreates an era of television westerns and Bakelite phones, a time when Perth residents had just learned to worry about unlocked doors and windows, and when you could buy a house and land for $14,000 – if you were a man. If you were a woman with $13,000, as the novel points out, you needed a man to stand guarantor for the rest.'  (Introduction)

Zuri was seven when she first saw a dragon. An army from the Dragonlands was coming north, brutally expanding their empire. Her village is conquered, and Zuri is captured by soldiers and sold as a slave. A fast learner, she works as a scribe; a fast runner, she wins prizes on fair-days... but she still remembers her home, south of the sea, and she remembers the Dragonlords, their iron weapons and scale armour, their great carrion-eating wyverns and their monstrous reptilian mounts. Aided by mercenaries and pirates, the Dragonlords continue their conquest of the north. When they besiege Cavalis, Tam the Elf, the rat-catcher's slave-boy, is the only one who knows a way under the walls - a tunnel much too narrow for any adult. To save their city and themselves, Zuri and Tam must stay ahead of the Dragonlords as they run through unfamiliar lands... armed only with their wits, a tiny knife and a letter from the Duke, they search for a way to defeat an army and win their freedom.

Source: Publisher's Blurb

'Wilson is an Australian comic book writer who has traveled to Tokyo to meet his collaborators. Kyoko and Yoshi. They had created a web-based comic called The Conqueror Worm. "Wilson had written most of the story, Kyoko had translated it into Japanese and drawn the human characters, but Yoshi had designed the distinctive steampunk hardware, the elaborate deathtraps, the architecture of Hell, and most of the dreaming demons." Kyoko tells Wilson that meeting Yoshi is problematical. He is hikikomori, someone who cannot leave his bedroom unless there is no one around. Wilson manages to meet with Yoshi, who is something of a Poe-like recluse whose only company is a sex doll that he calls Midori. Things go downhill from there.'

Source: SFRevu (http://www.sfrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=14272). (Sighted: 18/2/2014)