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A wayward, wanton selection of stories grounded in displacement, desire, and the wish coursing through us to accede to the state of love. There is torment and illness, crude reality and distant fragrant places, peopled by characters that reside close to our bones, our psyches, our flesh. A Japanese soprano has lost her voice and seeks repose on a sailing boat in Corsica. A South African advertising executive learns the ropes at his Accra office. Destructive lovers interview a renowned musician in dusty Bamako. Lovers meet, fade, delude. We are weak and defiant beings, ever-learning, ever-lustful.

 

Fine stories, rank with exotic air, bursting like old fruit. - Bruce Pascoe

 

McNamara's work has a fierce, vital beat, her stories robust yet finely worked, her voice striking in its confidence and originality. She writes with sensuous precision and a craft that is equally precise. This is fiction that can stand up in any company. - Hilary Mantel

Monasteries and gaols: David Foster reflects that during the course of his life the monasteries have emptied while the gaols are doing nicely. Set in Goulburn and its surrounds, where Foster resides, The Contemptuary is a lament for a dying faith, a commentary on prison life and, perhaps unexpectedly from Foster in this, his sixteenth novel, an unputdownable whodunnit.

 

'Attempt to characterise Foster's writing and eventually one will run out of adjectives. There is simply no one remotely like him in contemporary Australian fiction. He is so far ahead of everyone else that it's not funny.' - Australian Book Review

The Ladder is Simon West's third collection of poetry, and his first in four years. Many earlier preoccupations return-the natural environment, Italian art, the dimensions of place. There is a new focus on worldly and artistic responsibility, and finding that 'certain poise' of 'being in between'. At the collection's heart are the building blocks of language, along with the more literal ones of Rome, where some of these poems were written during a residency at the Whiting studio in 2012.

will benefit it is attentive and brilliant readers, of whom John Leonard is without doubt one of its finest. - Martin Harrison

 

Australian poetry from a 21st century perspective, with a selection from a wide range of living poets as well as familiar voices from the past. There is an emphasis on social observation and personal experience of Australia's changing history that gives new context to poetry by previous generations from Wright and Hope through Lawson and Paterson to Harpur, Kendall and the poets of early settlement. - Susan Lever

 

Two centuries of poetic achievement demonstrating - no, crying out full-throatedly - that it is our poets who manifest 'a pungent awareness that language is an inheritance we accept for alteration and renewal.' This selection is panoramic, but it also has a depth and a thoughtfulness in its clusters of poems by 164 original, funny, perplexing, and gifted poets. If you love poetry, this book will amplify that love; and if you are a teacher or student of poetry, read this anthology over and over. -Lyn McCredden

 

John Leonard, born in 1940, taught poetry at Monash and James Cook Universities. He is founder of John Leonard Press, and has edited the anthologies Seven Centuries of Poetry in English (5th ed. 2003), New Music (2001), Australian Verse: An Oxford Anthology (1998) and Contemporary Australian Poetry (1990).

It is 1977 and Kate is a seventeen-year-old HSC student from Sydney's North Shore. She has dreams of becoming the next Ita Buttrose and being the editor of Cleo. Yet the 1970's free love and peace vibe has not yet hit Kate's suburban home in Beecroft. Kate's carefree behaviour leads her parents to seek the advice of Doctor Jack Grafton, a maverick psychiatrist. Kate is subsequently subjected to Slumber Therapy where she is given a cocktail of drugs that leave her confused about what is real. The second part of the novel witnesses the decline of Grafton who claimed he could cure all mental illness, after multiple deaths of his patients. After Jack's suicide, a bereaved fellow psychiatrist attempts to tell the story of his sharp-minded gregarious friend and defends his increasingly irrational behaviour in the lead-up to his death.

 

Like Puberty Blues for the mirror side of the harbour. - Keri Glastonbury

A confronting puzzle that startles with its sharp, vivid enactment of a tragedy of human innocence caught in the grip of a kind of blithe corruption. - Carmel Bird, author of The White Garden

 

Don't be deceived by this tardis of a book, its three small monologues contain multitudes. Through the gently detailed lives of its subjects whole civilisations emerge: the fifteenth-century India of the dying and illiterate poet, Kabir; the Stalinist Russia of Chekhov's younger sister, Maria; and the early seventeenth-century, Inquisition-ravaged Italy of the Calabrian theologian and poet, Tommaso Campanella. The characters, at the end of their lives, are haunted by their pasts, and in prose of simple, meditative, elegiac beauty, Jaireth suggests that this nostalgia is neither a longing for a lost place or a lost time, but is, rather, a homelessness in time - his own included - an uneasiness that has driven all that they have and have not done. The book is ultimately about the mystery of creation itself, the silence from which all things come and to which they inevitably return.

- John Hughes

Subhash Jaireth lives in Canberra. Between 1969 and 1978 he spent nine years in Moscow. He has published three books of poetry: Yashodhara: Six Seasons without You (Wild Peony, 2003), Unfinished Poems for Your Violin (Penguin Australia, 1996) and Before the Bullet Hit Me (Vani Prakashan, 1994, in Hindi).

Waiting is a story of two odd couples in prose as marvellously idiosyncratic as its characters.

Big is a hefty cross-dresser and Little is little. Both are long used to the routines of boarding house life in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, but Little, with the prospect of an inheritance, is beginning to indulge in the great Australian dream, which has Big worried. Little's cousin, Angus, is a solitary man who designs lake-scapes for city councils, and strangely constructed fireproof houses for the bushfire zone. A handy man, he meets Jasmin an academic who races in her ideas as much as in her runners. Her head is set on publishing books on semiotics and her heart is turned towards her stalled personal life. All four are waiting, for something if not someone.

'Philip Salom and I once watched a golf tournament together. A mutual friend was caddying and we talked along the fairways, discussed things in the long grass and conversed among the trees to the sound of light applause. I knew Philip was a poet but it was obvious to me by the final round that he was also a wonderful storyteller. As you are about to see, I was right.' - John Clarke

'Philip Salom's Waiting is a strangely compelling bittersweet tale of the marginalised and the searching. From a rooming house to the world of academia, the novel shimmers with a cast of larger-than-life characters - Big and Little, Angus and Jasmin. Weirdly moving, tender, and insightful.' - Antoni Jach

'Stories with flashes of poetry and sudden insight and such profound compassion that they should be labelled 'WARNING: Could make the reader kinder.' Send a copy to a politician.' - Sue Woolfe

A woman returns to Australia to clear out her father’s house, with an eye to transforming the contents into an art installation in the tradition of the revered Chinese artist Song Dong. What she hasn’t reckoned with is the tangle of jealousies, resentments, and familial complications that she had thought, in leaving the country, she had put behind her — a tangle that ensnares her before she arrives.