AustLit

'Bani Adam returns as the narrator–protagonist of Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Other Half of You, a sequel to his two previous books. The most recent one, The Lebs (2018), gave us the story of Bani’s teenage years at Punchbowl Boys’ High School: the trials of a Lebanese Muslim boy in a majority Lebanese Muslim community nestled inside the larger, diverse territories of Western Sydney, in post-‘War on Terror’ Australia. The Other Half of You is an account of Bani’s late teens and early twenties, and of an inner conflict between religious, cultural, and romantic pieties.' (Introduction)

'On the back cover of O, we learn that the protagonist of the novel, Dominique, lived through the German occupation of France, participated in the Resistance, relished its ‘clandestine life’, and later wrote an ‘erotic novel about surrender, submission and shame’, which became the real-life international bestseller and French national scandal, Histoire d’O (1954). ‘But what is the story really about,’ the blurb asks, ‘Dominique, her lover, or the country and the wartime past it would rather forget?’' (Introduction)

'In the very early hours of an otherwise unmemorable day in autumn 2007, I decided that I would never have children.'  (Publication abstract)

'I possess a photograph of myself that was taken near midnight on New Year’s Eve two decades ago. I’m on the dance floor at a nightclub and my then-girlfriend has an arm around my shoulder. She is speaking directly into my ear in a stern and purposeful way, trying to impress good sense into a self-certain young man with bulging muscles, blond tips in his hair and an obscene amount of alcohol in his system. The expression on my face is blank: I can hear what she tells me, but I’m not listening because I’ve already made up my mind. The guy who casually groped her as he squeezed past us moments before is destined to greet the New Year in an inauspicious way.'  (Introduction)

'In Otherland (2010), Maria Tumarkin writes: ‘Humility is a big deal to me…’, and her first three nonfiction books – all of which delve deeply, unapologetically and revealingly into ‘serious’ territories – carry the imprint of that Big Deal, in their conception and tone. Tumarkin has previously approached trauma, genocide, war, loss, guilt, systematic oppression, and survival with exploratory urgency. Her newest book, Axiomatic, is written in the same spirit. Here, Tumarkin has taken Australian society and culture as her chief subject for the first time, attending to very real but not obviously historical crises, while expanding on thematic concerns that run through her body of work. It is her most vital, compressed and compelling book to date.'  (Introduction)

In The Rapids: Ways of looking at mania, Sam Twyford-Moore takes a personal, exploratory, and speculative approach to the subject of mania. Because the author has been significantly governed by manic episodes on several occasions (he was diagnosed with manic depression as he ‘came into adulthood’), The Rapids offers an insider’s perspective. It also considers some of the public and cultural manifestations of the illness, via figures as diverse as Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow, Kanye West, Carrie Fisher, Andrew Johns, and Matthew Newton, but with a particular focus on literature and film. (Introduction)

'In Relatively Famous, Roger Averill combines a fictional memoir with extracts from a faux-biography of the memoirist’s Booker Prize-winning father, Gilbert Madigan. The biography amounts to a fairly bloodless summary of the events of Madigan’s life, and his son’s memoir is similarly sedate. This makes for a limp but sensitively conceived novel about paternal failure and the extent to which parents remain the authors of their children’s lives.' (Introduction)

'I fell in love intensely and often from an absurdly young age. In practice, my manner of loving involved contemplating a mental image of the girl I was devoted to, dreaming about her most nights, and imagining scenarios that might offer opportunities to demonstrate the depth of my feelings. I wanted to risk my life to save hers, accept responsibility for her misdeeds, or even degrade myself in the eyes of others - as long as she understood what was being communicated. I had no ambition to “win” her affection; all I needed was for her to understand the message. That was my fantasy of consummation.' (Introduction)

'When I left home, at age 15, I had nowhere to stay, so a school friend’s mother offered to let me live with her and her children for a while. At first I slept on the floor in my friend’s room; later I was given a small foldout foam sofa and a space in the living room. I did my best to keep out of the house when I wasn’t at school or work, but I knew that my presence was inconvenient.' (Introduction)

'From 2014 to 2016, Nicholas Turner documented the “aesthetics of sport at a grassroots level” for an online website he founded with a friend. Turner’s idiosyncratic reports on amateur sports — from dancing to arm-wrestling, schoolboy rugby to rodeo — made international lists of “best online writing” and led to interest from a British literary agent, who wanted him to produce a collection of longer essays.' (Introduction)

'The many gaps in the verifiable history of Jeanne d’Arc’s early years in rural France, as well as her improbable rise to prominence and martyrdom, have left room for a considerable amount of speculation and projection over the centuries. There is no shortage of fictional or historical accounts of her life, or ways of characterising the Maid’s struggle, but with The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc Ali Alizadeh breathes fresh life into a story that has been retold and re-contextualised over and again.' (Introduction)

'The middle class shields itself from the realities of life when you’re poor

'I spent much of my childhood in a northwestern suburb of Adelaide that was, for decades, predominantly white and working class. Waves of eastern European migrants formed the foundation of its settlement throughout the 1950s and 60s, before it underwent a significant transformation in the 80s when the new waves of ­migrants and refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and China settled there in large numbers. Mansfield Park also boasted an extensive collection of public housing that ensured underemployed Anglo-Australians, such as my parents, were well represented' (Introduction)

'With ‘Taboo’, Kim Scott sketches out a new way of accepting our histories, and imagining our future.

'Shaun Prescott’s début novel shares obvious conceptual territory with the fiction of Franz Kafka and Gerald Murnane, both of whom are mentioned in its promotional material. As with The Castle (1926) and The Plains (1982), The Town recounts the dreamlike experiences and observations of an enigmatic narrator–protagonist after he arrives in an unnamed town. But unlike Kafka’s surveyor or Murnane’s filmmaker, Prescott’s narrator is a writer who claims to be researching ‘a book about the disappearing towns in the Central West region of New South Wales’. These towns ‘had not deteriorated economically, its residents had not flocked to the closest regional towns in search of work, the buildings had not been dismantled’. Instead, they had ‘simply disappeared’. When this project fails, he decides to write a history of the town he now lives in, in the hope of uncovering its ‘essence’.' (Introduction)