AustLit

'With quiet optimism and a haunting poignancy, the award-winning poet Anthony Lawrence's first novel explores the strange, sometimes marvelous, and entirely disorienting world of James Molloy. For however unexceptional James—an average student, a dutiful son—may appear to outsiders, he knows that he is different. He has visions, and in their eerie halflight two realities—the one that he lives in and the one that lives in him—collide, intermingle, coalesce. Sometimes out of the vibrant confusion inside his head come voices that glide from his mind into his mouth. Vision finds a language of its own. Alone, isolated by his difference, James faces a future without close companionship until the day that he meets Stephanie Riley, a sympathetic guide who leads him to unexpected truths, and then disappears. Driven to learn what lies at the center of his curious universe, James begins a heartrending journey that takes him from a tragic romantic interlude in rural Australia to the west coast of Ireland. There, even as he enters the emotionally turbulent world of Sarah Carmichael, a talented, hard-drinking fiddle player, James emerges into the clarity of self-awareness. And discovers at last the possibilities that lie in friendship, art, love, tomorrow.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The balloon had drifted over a wooded ridge and into their valley. The farmworkers, straightening up one by one, shaded their eyes against the dazzle of the sun on crimson and blue silk. The thing hung in the sky - sumptuous, menacing - like a sign from God or the devil. Then there was thunder and fire, and a man plummeting earthwards. It was the 14th of July. The world was about to change.

'The timeless story of Sophie nursing the ambition to create a repeat-flowering crimson rose, the like of which has never been seen in Europe. Then Stephen, the American balloonist falling out of the sky and into Sophie's life - a love story that unfolds against the sensuous green landscape of Gascony. It is the 14th of July, the year is 1789 and revolution hangs in the air closing in on the private world of the Saint-Pierre family and threatening to change their world forever.'

– Publisher's website

'Simon and Flora Beaufort have three perfect children and a comfortable, happy life in London. When Flora takes the children for a month-long vacation in France, Simon stays home to work on his latest film project ... what could go wrong?

'A Pure Clear Light examines a marriage at the moment it goes haplessly off-track: Simon succumbs to the temptation of his cool, blonde accountant and Flora heeds the cry of her reawakened faith. Ultimately, though, neither Simon nor Flora can escape the revelation that lies beyond excuses and remorse and candour, at the heart of the phenomenon called love.' (From Text Publishing's website.)

The Mammoth Book of Arthurian Legends is an anthology which brings together traditional stories about King Arthur, as well as several new interpretations of the legend, providing an extensive picture of his birth, adventures romance, and fate. It traces Arthur's exploits to gain the sword Excalibur, the conflict with his half-sister Morgan, the birth of his bastard son Mordred, and the shadowy influence and fate of Merlin.

Among the authors whose work is included are Howard Pyle, Geoffrey of Monmouth, John Steinbeck, Rosemary Sutcliff, Roger Lancelyn Green, Hilaire Belloc, Arthur Machen, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Jane Yolen and others, including Australia's Stephen Dedman.

'Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this brilliant novel from Madeleine St John, author of The Women in Black, is a comic and tender look at the vicissitudes of love and relationships.

'Nicola should never have stepped out to buy that pack of cigarettes, because the man she discovers in her living room when she returns is not the adorable, straightforward, devoted Jonathan with whom she has been sharing her life.

'That Jonathan would never have unilaterally decided that she should, as he abruptly put it, ‘move out’.

'A shocked Nicola packs her bags and sets out bravely on the bumpy course that will take her from the end of an affair to the essence of the thing.' (Publication summary : Text Classics)