Дебра Данк0.0 We Come with This Place is a remarkable book, as rich, varied and surprising as the vast landscape in which it is set. Debra Dank has created an extraordinary mosaic of vivid episodes that move about in time and place to tell an unforgettable story of country and people.
Dank calibrates human emotions with honesty and insight, and there is plenty of dry, down-to-earth humour. You can feel and smell and see the puffs of dust under moving feet, the ever-present burning heat, the bright exuberance of a night-time campfire, the emerald flash of a flock of budgerigars, the journeying wind, the harshness of a station shanty, the welcome scent of fresh water.
We Come with This Place is deeply personal, a profound tribute to family and the Gudanji Country to which Debra Dank belongs, but it is much more than that. Here is Australia as it has been for countless generations, land and people in effortless balance, and Australia as it became, but also Australia as it could and should be.
Энди Джексон0.0 A ground-breaking insight into the experience of disability, from a distinguished poet who has lived with Marfan Syndrome, including severe spinal curvature, and whose poems give voice to those who are often treated as ‘other’ or alien.
The poems are visceral and intimate, they comfort and discomfort at the same time – empathy for the other seems to falter, only to expand and deepen.
The poems in Human Looking speak with the voices of the disabled and the disfigured, in ways which are confronting, but also illuminating and tender. They speak of surgical interventions, and of the different kinds of disability which they seek to ‘correct’. They range widely, finding figures to identify with in mythology and history, art and photography, poetry and fiction. A number of poems deal with unsettling extremes of embodiment, and with violence against disabled people. Others emerge out of everyday life, and the effects of illness, pain and prejudice. The strength of the speaking voice is remarkable, as is its capacity for empathy and love. ‘I, this wonderful catastrophe’, the poet has Mary Shelley’s monstrous figure declare. The use of unusual and disjunctive – or ‘deformed’ – poetic forms, adds to the emotional impact of the poems.
Нарди Симпсон0.0 Darnmoor, The Gateway to Happiness. The sign taunts a fool into feeling some sense of achievement, some kind of end- that you have reached a destination in the very least. Yet as the sign states, Darnmoor is merely a gateway, a waypoint on the road to where you really want to be.
Darnmoor is the home of the Billymil family, three generations who have lived in this 'gateway town'. Race relations between Indigenous and settler families are fraught, though the rigid status quo is upheld through threats and soft power rather than the overt violence of yesteryear.
As progress marches forwards, Darnmoor and its surrounds undergo rapid social and environmental changes, but as some things change, some stay exactly the same. The Billymil family are watched (and sometimes visited) by ancestral spirits and spirits of the recently deceased, who look out for their descendants and attempt to help them on the right path.
When the town's secrets start to be uncovered the town will be rocked by a violent act that forever shatters a century of silence.
Full of music, Yuwaalaraay language and exquisite description, Song of the Crocodile is a lament to choice and change, and the unyielding land that sustains us all, if only we could listen to it
Чармейн Пейперток Грин0.0 Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Women's Studies, Native Australian Studies. Forty years ago, letters, words and feelings flowed between a teenage daughter and her mother. Letters written by that teenage daughter--me--handed around family back home, disappeared. Yet letters from that mother to her teenage daughter--me--remained protected in my red life-journey suitcase. I carried them across time and landscapes as a mother would carry her baby in a thaga. In 1978-79, I was living in an Aboriginal girls' hostel in the Bentley suburb of Perth, attending senior high school. Mum and I sent handwritten letters to each other. I was a small-town teenager stepping outside of all things I had ever known. Mum remained in the only world she had ever known. NGANAJUNGU YAGU was inspired by Mother's letters, her life and the love she instilled in me for my people and my culture. A substantial part of that culture is language, and I missed out on so much language interaction having moved away. I talk with my ancestors' language--Badimaya and Wajarri--to honour ancestors, language centres, language workers and those Yamaji who have been and remain generous in passing on cultural knowledge.
Пэм Браун0.0 Click here for what we do is a cluster of four loosely connected poems that are not only sceptical of the status quo's serial mendacities and hype but, in a way, they also attempt a coming to terms with the erosion of the idealistic conditions that once made non-mainstream culture, including poetry, so viable and, even, necessary. For Pam Brown writing poetry is a habit, a disorganised ritual. Her poetic inventories begin in everyday bricolage. Real things interrupt the poems the same way thoughts and phrases do. She dismantles monumental intent and then, by mixing (rather than layering), splices the remains into a melange of imagery and thoughtful lyric. Hers is a friendly intelligence that clues in connections to the 'social' as the poems make political and personal associative links. Spurning any lofty design these poems debug the absurdities of contemporary materialism with surreptitious humour. Though disquiet is present it's usually temporary. Here, thinking about the future can be 'trickgensteinian' and yet Pam Brown's poems offer a circumspect optimism.
Шастра Део0.0 Winner of the 2016 Thomas Shapcott Prize for Poetry and the 2018 ALS Gold Medal. With its wildness and originality, The Agonist is an exhilarating collection. Exploring the languages of anatomy, etymology and incantation, these poems spark conversations about fracture and repair, energy, love and danger.
Зои Моррисон0.0 A gripping and beautifully written novel in the tradition of Elizabeth is Missing and the work of Elizabeth Harrower.
I have no use for forgiveness, not yet. But other ideas like that,
kindness, for example, I think that is fundamental. Resurrection;
I like that too. And love, of course, love, love, love.
Alice Murray learns to play the piano aged three on an orange orchard in rural Australia. Recognising her daughter's gift, her mother sends Alice to boarding school in the bleak north of England, and there Alice stays for the rest of her childhood. Then she's offered a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London, and on a summer school in Oxford she meets Edward, an economics professor who sweeps her off her feet.
Alice soon finds that Edwards is damaged, and she's trapped. She clings to her playing and to her dream of becoming a concert pianist, until disaster strikes. Increasingly isolated as the years unravel, eventually Alice can't find it in herself to carry on. Then she hears the most beautiful music from the walls of her house …
This novel's love story is that of a woman who must embrace life again if she is to survive. Inspiring and compelling, it explores the dark terrain of violence and the transformative powers of music and love.
Бренда Найлл0.0 Daniel Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne from 1917 until his death, aged ninety-nine, in 1963, was a towering figure in Melbourne's Catholic community. But his political interventions had a profound effect on the wider Australian nation too.
Award-winning biographer Brenda Niall has made some unexpected discoveries in Irish and Australian archives which overturn some widely held views. She also draws on her own memories of meeting and interviewing Mannix to get to the essence of this man of contradictions, controversies and mystery.
Mannix is not only an astonishing new look at a remarkable life, but a fascinating depiction of Melbourne in the first half last century.
Brenda Niall is one of Australia's foremost biographers. She is the author of four award-winning biographies, including her acclaimed accounts of the Boyd family. Brenda has degrees from the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University and Monash University. She has held visiting fellowships at the University of Michigan, Yale University and the Australian National University. In 2004 she was awarded the Order of Australia for 'services to Australian literature, as an academic, biographer and literary critic'. She frequently reviews for the Age, Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Book Review.
Дженнифер Мейден0.0 Drones and Phantoms [Winner 2015 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal] is a powerful successor to Jennifer Maiden's prize-winning book Liquid Nitrogen, with her characteristic interweaving of personal and public forms of address evident in each poem, and throughout the collection as a whole.
Alexis Wright0.0 An inventive, cacophonous novel about an Aboriginal girl living in a future world turned upside down—where ancient myths exist side-by-side with present-day realities.
Oblivia Ethelyne was given her name by an old woman who found her deep in the bowels of a gum tree, tattered and fragile, the victim of a brutal assault by wayward local youths. These are the years leading up to Australia’s third centenary, and the woman who finds her, Bella Donna of the Champions, is a refugee from climate change wars that devastated her country in the northern hemisphere. Bella Donna takes Oblivia to live with her on an old warship in a polluted dry swamp and there she fills Oblivia’s head with story upon story of swans. Fenced off from the rest of Australia by the Army, its traditional custodians left destitute, the swamp has become “the world’s most unknown detention camp” for Indigenous Australians. When Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia invades the swamp with his charismatic persona and the promise of salvation, Oblivia agrees to marry him, becoming First Lady, a role that has her confined to a tower in a flooded and lawless southern city.
In this multilayered novel, winnter of the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal, Wright toys with the edges of the world we live in to offer us an intimate portrait of the realities facing Aboriginal people. We meet talking monkeys, genies with doctorates, spirit-guiding swans, and a whole cast of characters drawn from myth and legend and fairy tales. Through symbolism and a dazzling linguistic dexterity—the blending of words and phrases from high and low culture, from English, Aboriginal languages, French, and Latin—Wright beautifully demonstrates how the power of the human imagination can set us free.
Мишель де Крецер3.0
Laura travels the world before returning to Sydney, where she works for a publisher of travel guides. Ravi dreams of being a tourist until he is driven from Sri Lanka by devastating events. An enthralling array of people, places and stories surround these superbly drawn characters - from Theo, whose life plays out in the long shadow of the past, to Hana, an Ethiopian woman determined to reinvent herself. Michelle de Kretser illuminates travel, work and modern dreams in this brilliant evocation of the way we live now. Questions of Travel is infused with wit, imagination, uncanny common sense and a deep understanding of what makes us tick.
Джиллиан Мирс0.0 The sound of horses' hooves turns hollow on the farms west of Wirri. If a man can still ride, if he hasn't totally lost the use of his legs, if he hasn't died to the part of his heart that understands such things, then he should go for a gallop. At the very least he should stand at the road by the river imagining that he's pushing a horse up the steep hill that leads to the house on the farm once known as One Tree.
Ким Скотт0.0 That Deadman Dance is set in the first decades of the 19th century in and around what is now Albany, Western Australia, an area known by some historians as 'the friendly frontier'. The book explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people, European settlers and American whalers.
The novel's hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful and eager to please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining them hunting whales, tilling the land, exploring the hinterland and establishing the fledgling colony. But slowly – by design and by accident – things begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the colony is developing. Stock mysteriously start to disappear; crops are destroyed; there are 'accidents' and injuries.
As the new arrivals impose ever stricter rules and regulations in order to keep the peace, Bobby Wabalanginy's Elders decide they must respond. A friend to everyone, Bobby is forced to take sides: he must choose between the old world and the new, his ancestors and his settler friends. Inexorably, he is drawn into a series of events that will forever change not just the colony but the future of Australia.
David Malouf4.0 In this exquisite gem of a novel, David Malouf shines new light on Homer's Iliad, adding twists and reflections, as well as flashes of earthy humour, to surprise and enchant. Lyrical, immediate and heartbreaking, Malouf's fable engraves the epic themes of the Trojan war onto a perfect miniature - themes of war and heroics, hubris and humanity, chance and fate, the bonds between soldiers, fathers and sons, all brilliantly recast for our times.
Кристос Циолкас3.6 Это был обычный пикник возле обычного дома в пригороде Мельбурна, на котором собрались совсем обычные люди. И ничто не предвещало того, что совсем скоро случится то, что случилось.
Один из гостей, взбешенный поведением чужого трехлетнего ребенка, отвешивает ему полновесную пощечину. И отзвук этой пощечины читатель обнаружит в каждой строчке романа признанной звезды современной австралийской литературы Кристоса Циолкаса.
«Пощечина» — яркий, захватывающий роман о любви, о браке, о родителях и детях, о чувствах и страстях, о том, из чего складывается современная семья. А также о том, какие дороги мы выбираем, какую ответственность несем, какой жизнью живем, какое общество строим и какое будущее готовим себе и своим детям.
Мишель де Крецер0.0 Tom Loxley, an Indian-Australian professor, is less concerned with finishing his book on Henry James than with finding his dog, who is lost in the Australian bush. Joining his daily hunt is Nelly Zhang, an artist whose husband disappeared mysteriously years before Tom met her. Although Nelly helps him search for his beloved pet, Tom isn't sure if he should trust this new friend.
Tom has preoccupations other than his book and Nelly and his missing dog, mainly concerning his mother, who is suffering from the various indignities of old age. He is constantly drawn from the cerebral to the primitive--by his mother's infirmities, as well as by Nelly's attractions. THE LOST DOG makes brilliant use of the conventions of suspense and atmosphere while leading us to see anew the ever-present conflicts between our bodies and our minds, the present and the past, the primal and the civilized.
Alexis Wright0.0 The novel tells the interconnected stories of several inhabitants of the fictional town of Desperance, situated on the Gulf of Carpentaria in northwest Queensland. There, the Aboriginal people of the Pricklebush clan are engaged in a number of argumentative conflicts with various enemies in the community, including the white inhabitants of Desperance, the local law enforcement and government officials, and a large multinational mining operation that has been established on their traditional sacred land. The narrative chronicles the interpersonal relationships shared between three men embroiled in these disputes: the wise, pragmatic, and blunt Normal Phantom; the nomadic, overzealous shamanic practitioner of Aboriginal traditional religion, Mozzie Fishman; and Norm's son, Will Phantom, who deserted his father's house to undertake a cross-country spiritual journey with Fishman, but who has now returned home with something of Fishman's character in him.
Грегори Дэй0.0 A contemporary fable, this book shows that when life seems dull and cruel it is the power of the natural world, and our ability to imagine it, that can bring the wonder back into living.In the southern Italian village of Stellanuova, in the 1700s, a Franciscan monk, Fra Ionio, becomes known as the Patron Saint of Eels when he brings a distraught fisherman's yearly catch of eels back from the dead in the village market. When Stellanuova's inhabitants emigrate to Australia in the post World War II migrations of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, the immortal saint is left looking down on an abandoned town. To fulfil his calling, he decides in heaven to migrate with his countrymen and now looks down on the state of Victoria, where he intercedes in matters relating to eels.
In the southern Victorian town of Mangowak, Noel Lea lives with the melancholy inheritance of a place undergoing the gentrifications of contemporary Australia. Along with his oldest friend, Nanette Burns, he longs for a time when life was less complex and unexpected magic seemed to permeate the ocean town and its people. When spring rains flood a nearby swamp and hundreds of eels get trapped in the grassy ditches around Noel's family home, he and Nanette encounter the vibrant Fra Ionio and get more magic than they bargained for.A beautifully written, charming and evocative book by Gregory Day, who also authored Trace , in collaboration with photographer, Robert Ashton.
Гейл Джонс0.0 Sixty Lights is the captivating chronicle of Lucy Strange, an independent girl growing up in the Victorian world. From her childhood in Australia through to her adolescence in England and Bombay and finally to London, Lucy is fascinated by light and by the new photographic technology. Her perception of the world is passionate and moving, revealed in a series of frozen images captured in the camera of her mind's eye showing her feelings about love, life and loss. In this confident, finely woven and intricate novel Jones has created an unforgettable character in Lucy; visionary, gifted and exuberant, she touches the lives of all who know her.
Кейт Дженнингс0.0 On Wall Street, reflects Cath, women are about as welcome as fleas in a sleeping bag. Funny, liberal and left-leaning, she is an unlikely candidate to be writing speeches on derivatives in a Manhattan tower, 'putting words in the mouths of plutocrats deeply suspicious of metaphors and words of more than two syllables'. She finds herself on Wall Street because she needs serious money. After ten good years, her beloved older husband Bailey is suffering from Alzheimer's.
So begins Cath's journey into two nightmare worlds. By day she deals with the topsy-turvy logic and ingrown personalities at work in high finance; by night she has to watch the slow disintegration of the man she loves. In between, she must stop herself from falling apart. As the money markets hurtle towards financial meltdown, Cath faces personal disaster and a moral hazard that she cannot ignore.Kate Jennings' prose is lean yet rich in unexpected, telling detail. Tense, taut and compulsively readable, Moral Hazard is peopled by extraordinary characters and informed by a mordant, witty intelligence.
Ричард Фланаган3.8 Безработный тасманиец находит в лавке старьевщика удивительную книгу, которая переносит его в девятнадцатый век, в жестокую и фантастическую реальность островного каторжного поселения Сара-Айленд у берегов Земли Ван-Димена (ныне Тасмании).
Родни Холл0.0 "The Great war ends, as it began, with military blunders. A field ambulance station is being evacuated when a young soldier, blinded by gas during the fighting, joins the wrong queue. Gas blisters in his throat prevent him from telling anyone that his name is Adolf Hitler, private first-class, of the Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry, Reserve Division, or that he is headed for Germany.
"The year is 1919. At Versailles, Australia has just signed a peace treaty destined to ruin Germany and create the conditions in which Nazism would thrive. Meanwhile, amid the celebrations at a remote fishing port in New South Wales, the steamer bringing Australian war heroes home also delivers the blinded Hitler. Here he meets Audrey McNeil, aspiring filmmaker and desparate opponent of her sister Sybil. Brief though his visit is, he changes Audrey's life.
"But is the stranger really who he claims to be?
"The Day We Had Hitler Home as much verbal cinema as a novel - is an audacious and intriguing story of a young woman's awakening to politics, to love, and to a new age sweeping across the world like a maelstrom."
Друзилла Моджеска0.0 A moving, deeply insightful study of two artists-both twentieth-century Australian women-who lived and worked in divergent realms
Drusilla Modjeska's title derives from an anecdote about the composer who, while creating a piece of music, ordered his family to remain silent while taking a meal with him-so Stravinsky could preserve his concentration on his work. Modjeska's book investigates the life patterns of women artists, most of whom have been unable to manage such a neat compartmentalization of daily life and creativity.
"Stravinsky's Lunch" tells the stories of two extraordinary women, both born close to the turn of the century in Australia and both destined to make important contributions to Australian painting. Stella Bowen went to London to make her career, then became a bohemian and the longtime mistress of Ford Madox Ford. Grace Cossington Smith, a spinster who never strayed far from her childhood home on the outskirts of Sydney, became one of the first Australian modernists. Their distinctive stories speak volumes about how love, art, and life intersect.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
