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Jena Chung plays the violin. She was once a child prodigy and is now addicted to sex. She's struggling a little. Her professional life comprises rehearsals, concerts, auditions and relentless practice; her personal life is spent managing family demands, those of her creative friends, and lots of sex. Jena is selfish, impulsive and often behaves badly, though mostly only to her own detriment. And then she meets Mark - much older and worldly-wise - who bewitches her. Could this be love? When Jena wins an internship with the New York Philharmonic, she thinks the life she has dreamed of is about to begin. But when Trump is elected New York changes irrevocably, and Jena along with it. Is the drea...
Heart-wrenching, heartwarming and ultimately uplifting--a story about the power of a little kindness.
'Before I go into my grave,' she says out loud, 'I will kill that man.' A brilliant new novel from the author of Real Differences. A family favour their son over their daughter. Shan attends university before making his fortune in Australia while Yannie must find menial employment and care for her ageing parents. After her mother's death, Yannie travels to Sydney to become enmeshed in her psychopathic brother's new life, which she seeks to undermine from within … This is a novel that rages against capitalism, hetero-supremacy, mothers, fathers, families – the whole damn thing. It's about what happens when you want to make art but are born in the wrong time and place. S. L. Lim brings to vivid life the frustrations of a talented daughter and vengeful sister in a nuanced and riveting novel that ends in the most unexpected way. It will not be easily forgotten. 'A coiled spring of a novel, Revenge hits you right between the eyes.' — Malcolm Harris
An oddly optimistic, witty and insightful generation-defining book for a lost generation, the miserable Millennials, from Bridie Jabour, opinion editor at Guardian Australia In the last days of 2019, journalist Bridie Jabour wrote a piece for The Guardian about the malaise of 31 year-old millennials and how the painful, protracted end of their adolescence is finally hitting home; they're hitting their thirties and the vast majority are neither famous, award-winning or rich -and that's making them miserable. The article went viral overnight, the response from readers was overwhelming, and Bridie decided the time had come to write a book about her generation - those much-maligned millenials. A...
A moving story of one child's life in a conflict zone: Shahana, a young girl living in war-torn Kashmir.
Yumiko Kadota was every Asian parent's dream: model student, top of her class in medical school and on track to becoming a surgeon. A self-confessed workaholic, she regularly put ‘knife before life’, knowing it was all going to be worth it because it would lead to her longed-for career. But if the punishing hours in surgery weren’t hard enough, she also faced challenges as a young female surgeon navigating a male-dominated specialty. She was regularly left to carry out complex procedures without senior surgeons’ oversight; she was called all sorts of things, from ‘emotional’ to ‘too confident’; and she was expected to work a relentless on-call roster – sometimes seventy hours a week or more – to prove herself. Eventually it was too much and Yumiko quit. Emotional Female is her account of what it was like to train in the Australian public hospital system, and what made her walk away. Yumiko Kadota is a voice for her generation when it comes to burnout and finding the resilience to rebuild after suffering a physical, emotional and existential breakdown. This is a brave, honest and unflinching work from a major new talent.
New Australian Fiction features brilliant writers with distinct experiences, voices and styles from all corners of Australia. Together they showcase the strength and diversity of Australian short fiction at its best. Contributors include: MAAME BLUE - CLAIRE G. COLEMAN - ELIZABETH FLUX KATERINA GIBSON - JACK KIRNE - DARIA LEBEDYEVA - DONNA MAZZA - LAURA MCPHEE-BROWNE - SOPHIE OVERETT - KA REES - MIRANDI RIWOE - MYKAELA SAUNDERS - LAURA STORTENBEKER - JESSIE TU - JACK VENING - MADELEINE WATTS Praise for New Australian Fiction 2019: 'The stories in this collection are nuanced, captivating and accomplished. With the briefest of brushstrokes, they reveal vivid and complex worlds. Australian shor...
Edgar Award nominee stuns in this heartrending tale set in a Swaziland boarding school where two girls of different castes bond over a shared copy of Jane Eyre. Adele Joubert loves being one of the popular girls at Keziah Christian Academy. She knows the upcoming semester at school is going to be great with her best friend Delia at her side. Then Delia dumps her for a new girl with more money, and Adele is forced to share a room with Lottie, the school pariah, who doesn't pray and defies teachers' orders. But as they share a copy of Jane Eyre, Lottie's gruff exterior and honesty grow on Adele, and Lottie learns to be a little sweeter. Together, they take on bullies and protect each other from the vindictive and prejudiced teachers. Then a boy goes missing on campus and Adele and Lottie must rely on each other to solve the mystery and maybe learn the true meaning of friendship.
Visual and performance artist, and winner of the inaugural Kill Your Darlings Manuscript Award, SJ Norman turns their hand to fiction with spectacular results. Permafrost explores the shifting spaces of desire, loss and longing. Inverting and queering the gothic and romantic traditions, each story represents a different take on the concept of a haunting or the haunted. Though it ranges across themes and locations &– from small-town Australia to Hokkaido to rural England &– this collection is united by the power of the narratorial voice, with its auto-fictional resonances, dark wit and swagger. Whether recounting the confusion of a child trying to decipher their father and stepmother's new relationship, the surrealness of an after-hours tour of Auschwitz, or a journey to wintry Japan to reconnect with a former lover, Permafrost unsettles, transports and impresses in equal measure.
When 21-year-old Oli sets sail from Australia she embarks on a trip that will open her eyes to life's possibilities. Some years later, fluent in the language of the ocean, she is the only female crew member on-board a yacht delivery to New Zealand. There, in the darkness below deck, she learns something new: at sea, no one can hear you scream. Below Deck is about the moments that haunt us, that fan out like ripples through the deep. It is a novel about the vagaries of consent, about who has the space to speak and who is believed.