Archives par étiquette : Text Publishing

TO THE RIVER de Vikki Wakefield

A compulsively readable, character-driven psychological thriller about two determined women who, over the course of three suspenseful weeks, take the law into their own hands to reveal the truth about a shocking crime. Vikki Wakefield’s compelling story is about class, corruption, and big-picture values of love, loyalty and the vindication of truth and justice. And a very brave dog called Blue.

TO THE RIVER
by Vikki Wakefield
Text Publishing (Australia), February 2024

How long can you hide the truth?
The Kelly family has always been in trouble. When a remote caravan community in a mining town burns to the ground, seventeen-yearold Sabine Kelly walks from the inferno, barely touched by the flames. Nine people are killed, including her mother and sister. When Sabine confesses to the murders, nobody is shocked.
Shortly after her arrest, she escapes custody and disappears.
Twelve years later, journalist Rachel Weidermann has been investigating the ‘Caravan Murders’ for the better part of a decade. Recently made redundant from marriage, motherhood and her career, she has long suspected Sabine made her way back to the river—now Rachel has time to indulge her obsession.
And her tenaciousness pays off: under cover of darkness, a houseboat moors nearby and a woman steps ashore. The story of the year has landed in Rachel’s lap; the arrest of the fugitive and a high-profile murder trial promise to bring it to a satisfying end. But Rachel’s ambition lights the fuse leading to a brutal chain of events. This time Sabine Kelly isn’t running—the web she weaves will entangle enemies and allies alike, forcing Rachel to question everything she believes about herself, about what it takes to be a survivor.

Vikki Wakefield writes realist fiction for young adults. Her work explores coming-of-age, family, class, relationships and the lives of contemporary teens. Her novels All I Ever Wanted, Friday Brown, Inbetween Days and Ballad for a Mad Girl have been shortlisted for numerous awards. This is How We Change the Ending won Book of the Year: Older Readers, Children’s Book Council Awards, 2020. Vikki lives in Adelaide, Australia.

RESTLESS DOLLY MAUNDER de Kate Grenville

An exquisite fictional portrait of Kate Grenville’s complex, conflicted grandmother—a woman Kate feared as a child, and only came to understand in adulthood.

RESTLESS DOLLY MAUNDER
by Kate Grenville
Text Publishing (Australia), July 2023

Dolly Maunder was born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society’s long-locked doors were finally starting to creak ajar for women. Born into a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, she spent her restless life pushing at those doors.
Most women like Dolly have more or less disappeared from view, remembered only in a family photo album as a remote figure in impossible clothes, and maybe for a lemon-pudding recipe. RESTLESS DOLLY MAUNDER brings one of them to life as a person we can recognise and whose struggles we can empathise with.
In this novel, Kate Grenville uses family memories and research to imagine her way into the life of her grandmother. This is the story of a woman born into a world of limits and obstacles who was able—though at a cost—to make a life for herself. Her battles and triumphs helped to open doors for the women who came after.

Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. Her international bestseller The Secret River was awarded local and overseas prizes, has been adapted for the stage and as an acclaimed television miniseries, and is now a much-loved classic. Grenville’s other novels include Sarah Thornhill, The Lieutenant, Dark Places and the Orange Prize winner The Idea of Perfection. Her recent non-fiction includes One Life: My Mother’s Story, The Case Against Fragrance and Elizabeth Macarthur’s Letters. Her most recent novel is the bestselling A Room Made of Leaves. She has also written three books about the writing process. In 2017 Grenville was awarded the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

VOYAGERS de Lauren Fuge

Journeying through remote landscapes across the Earth and beyond, VOYAGERS seeks to understand how human exploration has driven us into the Anthropocene.

VOYAGERS:
Our Journey into the Anthropocene
by Lauren Fuge
Text Publishing (Australia), August 2024

At night, as I stargazed from my tiny tent, I’d hear the primal whalesong roll up along the ocean floor and onto the beach where I lay. The ethereal melodies seeped through my shivering skin, like a relic of an ancient time. I felt as if I was eavesdropping across millennia, the sound stirring some faint genetic memory deep inside me.
Come home.
Since the beginning of human history, we have been wanderers. Modern humans left Africa by 150,000 years ago, heading first to Asia and Europe, then Australia, the Americas, and finally—in an incredible feat of innovation and imagination—across the Pacific. Our explorations yielded great rewards: land and resources, food and knowledge. In every landscape we have explored, we have become a force of change. Humans are the dominant influence on the environment. And our surging population and insatiable industrial metabolism are outgunning the planet’s own forces: the sea is sucking at our doorsteps; the forests fall too quickly for us to hear. Still, we seek new seas to fish, new oil deposits to drill, new land to develop. A compelling blend of natural history, science and memoir, journeying from the dramatic fjords of British Columbia to the ancient geology of outback Australia to the shifting coastlines of Norway, VOYAGERS asks: What drives our urge to explore? How has it influenced our relationship with the planet? And, in the face of imminent environmental collapse, can we find in our voyaging history the tools to reimagine our future?

Lauren Fuge is an award-winning science writer. She has been a science journalist for Cosmos magazine and was awarded the 2022 UNSW Bragg Prize for Science Writing; her writing features regularly in the Best Australian Science Writing anthology. She is undertaking a PhD exploring creative forms of climate communication.

WEST SIDE HONEY de Claire Christian

A sexy and empowering rom-com from the beloved author of It’s Been a Pleasure, Noni Blake.

WEST SIDE HONEY
by Claire Christian
Text Publishing, April 2023

Cleo has a few things going on. Two beautiful kids and a less beautiful ex-husband, a share house arrangement with her long-term bestie Jude (complete with a third child, also beautiful) and an underperforming florist business. Actually, the shop could be beautiful too, it’s just that Cleo hasn’t got time to think about it.
Her new week-on week-off custody schedule is about to change all that. She can put her own needs first for once—take a dance class, fix up the shop, even think about dating. Not that she’s looking for anything serious, but she’s open to exploring what she wants.
Which, it turns out, is a lot. Maybe too much?
But how can you work out what you really, really want unless you try a bit of everything?

Claire Christian tells stories. She is a writer, theatre-maker and facilitator based in Meanjin/Brisbane in Australia. She has had four plays published by Playlab, including Lysa and the Freeborn Dames, which debuted at La Boite in 2018. She had the great joy of directing Michelle Law’s smash-hit comedy Single Asian Female. Claire’s debut novel, Beautiful Mess, won the Text Prize in 2016. Her second novel, It’s Been a Pleasure, Noni Blake, was released in 2020.

UNTITLED ESSAY de Tyson Yunkaporta

A new essay by Tyson Yunkaporta, the best-selling author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.

UNTITLED ESSAY
by Tyson Yunkaporta
Text Publishing, October 2023

When Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk was published in 2018, the American writer Tommy Orange commented that it ‘shows how vital and alive and essential Indigenous ways of being and thinking are.’ Sand Talk examined global systems from an Indigenous point view. It was, as Miles Franklin-winning author Melissa Lukashenko remarked, ‘an extraordinary invitation into the world of the Dreaming’.
Tyson Yunkaporta’s new book extends his explorations of how we can think and act and speak by combining an analysis of indigenous thinking and living with an equally revelatory critique of postindustrial society. Like Sand Talk, this new book is a formidably original essay.
It describes how the ways that we relate to each other are inseparable from how we relate to the environments we live in. It is about how we talk to each other, or yarn: how we teach and learn. Along the way, Tyson talks to a range of people: liberal economists, performance and memorisation experts, Nordic stone carvers, Frisian ecologists, and Indigenous Australian thought-leaders, mathematicians, and storytellers.
This book is a sequence of thought experiments, which are, as Yunkaporta writes, ‘crowd-sourced narratives where everybody’s contribution to the story, no matter how contradictory, is honoured and included…the closest thing I can find in the world to the Aboriginal collective process of what we call “yarning”.’

Tyson Yunkaporta is an Aboriginal scholar, and founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne. His work focuses on applying Indigenous methods of inquiry to resolve complex issues and explore global issues. His first book, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, was published in 2019 and won the Small Publishers’ Adult Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards and the Ansari Institute’s Randa and Sherif Nasr Book Prize on Religion & the World.