July August 2014

AMillionWindows Gerald Murnane's new book A Million Windows was published by Giramondo in June 2014. This new work focuses on the importance of trust, and the possibility of betrayal, in storytelling as in life. It tests the relationship established between author and reader, and on occasions of intimacy, between child and parent, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife.

'A Million Windows is also something of a pattern book, as works such as Vacher's came to be known. In its pages a narrator attempts to rescue small human markers from the broader landscape of a lifetime's accumulated memory. He is a metaphysical gumshoe, tracking images across the years: recurrences that might yield some meaning to the perceiving self.
~ GEORDIE WILLIAMSON, The Australian

The French rights for Gerald's novels Barley Patch and Tamarisk Row have been sold to Buchet/Chastel (a subsidiary of Libella).
TheTwelfthRaven

UWA Publishing (University of Western Australia) published Doris Brett’s next book in March 2014, The Twelfth Raven; a literary journey through a series of life-threatening health crises involving two of the leading causes of death and disability in Australia - heart disease and stroke.

The Age reported on 3 November 2012 that there are about 350,000 Australians living with stroke. Most of the book is written from the point of view of the carer (Doris' husband, Martin was the patient), but to round things off, in the final section, Doris becomes the patient again as she is diagnosed with the faulty BrCa gene (which gives a lifetime 87% chance of developing breast cancer and a 40% chance of ovarian cancer) and opts to have a preventative mastectomy and reconstruction. This section, as well as resonating with the many thousands of women having mastectomies in Australia, also opens up the area which a growing number of people are having to address - medical science's increased ability to detect faulty genes and the difficult issues of what to do about them.

'In The Twelfth Raven, poet and psychologist Doris Brett confronts these threats with honesty and clarity. The result is an illness memoir as memorable as Eating the Underworld (2001), her remarkable book about ovarian cancer.'
~ RACHEL ROBERTSON, Australian Book Review

See the full review here. Listen to a podcast of her discussing the book on ABC Radio National's Life Matters here.

Robyn Bavati’s second novel, Pirouette was published by Flux in the USA November 2013 and by Penguin Books in Australia in January. Pirouette US sm

'Even readers less personally invested in dance can appreciate Bavati's treatment of newly discovered sisterhood and the twins' Parent Trap–like scheme. The author takes several potent fantasies—to dance professionally, to have a new sibling, and to swap lives with someone else for a while—and plays up the tension all three create through the escalating complications in her protagonists' lives.'
~ Publishers Weekly

Robyn's first novel, Dancing in the Dark was published by Penguin Books in February 2010 and in the USA by Flux in February 2013. It has been awared the silver medal in THE 2014 SYDNEY TAYLOR BOOK AWARDS and has been named a SYDNEY TAYLOR HONOR BOOK FOR TEENS.