DANCING BAREFOOT d’Alice Boyle

A story about finding love, figuring out your place in the world, and learning to embrace the challenges life throws in your path.

DANCING BAREFOOT
by Alice Boyle
Text Publishing, Summer 2022

Patch feels out of place at Mountford College: she wears the wrong clothes, she’s on a scholarship, and she has an embarrassingly persistent crush on Evie Vanhoutte, popular girl and golden child. Evie has no idea Patch exists until one day, a chance encounter sparks a friendship that’s equal parts exhilarating, terrifying, and very, very confusing.
As if that weren’t enough to deal with, Patch is also trying to avoid a vindictive school bully, forgetting to be supportive of her transitioning best friend, Edwin, and worrying about a potential new stepmother turning out to be the evil Baroness from The Sound of Music.

Winner of the 2021 Text Prize

Alice Boyle is an English teacher and author living in Naarm/Melbourne. She’s written for SBS Voices and the Stella Prize, and her short story ‘The Exchange’ was published in the anthology Growing Up Queer in Australia. In 2019 she was highly commended for the Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter program.

CHILDHOOD de Shannon Burns

In this arresting memoir, Shannon Burns recalls a childhood bouncing between dysfunctional homes in outer-suburban Adelaide, between impoverished family members unwilling or unable to care for him.

CHILDHOOD
by Shannon Burns
Text Publishing Australia, September 2022

This is what I think I know: my father met my mother while he was dating her sister. Their love was figured on betrayal, both hostile and libidinous. She was in her late teens. He was twenty and travelled everywhere barefoot. Neither had finished high school and both were decorated with amateur tattoos. Things may have been good for a while, but it didn’t last: they argued fiercely and he left. Weeks later, she tracked him down and said she was pregnant. So he moved back in, and they prepared themselves for parenthood.
Eleven months later I was born. By the time my father discovered the deception, it was too late.
There is something chastening about this mode of conception, about knowing that, by most ordinary standards, your beginning was aberrant.

Aged nine, Shannon Burns beats his head against the floor to get himself to sleep. Aged ten, he knows his mother will never be able to care for him: he is alone, and can trust no-one.
Five years later, he is working in a recycling centre—hard labour, poorly paid—yet reading offers hope. He begins reciting lines from Dante, Keats, Whitman, speeches by Martin Luther King, while sifting through the filthy cans and bottles. An affair with the mother of a schoolfriend offers a way out, a path to eventual independence and a life utterly unlike the one he was born into.
‘I want to imagine the past,’ Burns says, ‘in order to discard it more fully. I want to ensure that its power over me is diluted even further, to forestall the possibility of a more damaging reckoning.’ He writes concisely, sketching crisp scenes that often terrify in their brutality. Possessing a clarity of purpose and vividness of expression that bring to mind Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father, this book is destined to be a classic.

Shannon Burns is a writer and critic from Adelaide. His work has appeared in the Monthly, Meanjin and Australian Book Review.

AFTER YOU WERE GONE de Vikki Wakefield

What happens to a family when a child goes missing? How far would you go to learn the truth? AFTER YOU WERE GONE is Vikki Wakefield’s first psychological thriller.

AFTER YOU WERE GONE
by Vikki Wakefield
Text Publishing Australia, September 2022

In a busy street market, Abbie lets go of six-year-old Sarah’s hand. She isn’t a bad mother, just exhausted. When she turns around, her daughter isn’t there. After a full-scale search and a highprofile investigation, there is still no trace of Sarah.
Six years later, Abbie is in love and getting married. Her family, despite their problems, have seen her through her worst imaginings—only Abbie’s mother seems unwilling to let her move on. Her fragile peace is constantly threatened: not knowing what happened to Sarah is like living with a curse.
Then a phone call from an unknown number offers closure. A man claims to know what happened to Sarah, but if Abbie tells anyone or fails to follow instructions, she’ll never find out. What price must Abbie pay to know the truth?

Vikki Wakefield writes fiction for young adults and adults. Her work explores family, class and relationships in a contemporary setting. 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. AFTER YOU WERE GONE is her first novel for adults. Vikki lives in Adelaide, Australia.

THE WAY IT IS NOW de Garry Disher

Set in a beach-shack town an hour from Melbourne, THE WAY IT IS NOW tells the story of a burnt-out cop named Charlie Deravin.

THE WAY IT IS NOW
by Garry Disher
Text Publishing (Australia), November 2021

Twenty years ago Charlie Deravin’s mother went missing near the family beach shack—believed murdered; body never found. His father has lived under a cloud of suspicion ever since. Now Charlie’s back living in the shack in Menlo Beach, on disciplinary leave from his job with the police sex-crimes unit, and permanent leave from his marriage. After two decades worrying away at the mystery of his mother’s disappearance, he’s run out of leads. Then the skeletal remains of two people are found in the excavation of a new building site—and the past comes crashing in on Charlie.
THE WAY IT IS NOW is the enthralling new novel by Garry Disher, one of Australia’s most loved and celebrated crime writers.

Garry Disher has published over fifty titles across multiple genres. With a growing international reputation for his best-selling crime novels, he has won four German and three Australian awards for best crime novel of the year, and been longlisted twice for a British CWA Dagger award. In 2018 he received the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award.

WEIRD TO EXIST d’Alison Zai

Vibrant yet darkly humorous comics for commiserating over life’s deepest concerns, from Instagram artist Alison Zai.

WEIRD TO EXIST:
Simple Comics About Complex Feelings
by Alison Zai
Ten Speed, April 2022

We all know the gut-wrenching pang that comes after accepting a beautiful moment will soon become a distant memory. We all get into cycles where it feels like the failures and disappointments just keep coming. Instagram comics artist Alison Zai presents WEIRD TO EXIST, a collection of 100 comics that depict these universal emotions and existential musings with great accuracy and empathy.
This bright, colorful book is divided into three intrinsic human acts—loving, creating, and existing–and, ultimately, comments on how weird it is to do all of that. Zai’s cheery anthropomorphic characters go through the motions of relationships, loneliness, creativity blocks, mental health concerns, social anxiety, and more. These comics voice the overwhelming dread and unpredictable chaos found in all aspects of being alive. With sharp levity and emotional complexity, WEIRD TO EXIST captures the feelings that are not easily communicated but widely felt. This collection features 30 never-before-published comics alongside a selection of beloved fan favorites from Zai’s Instagram account.

Alison Zai is a comics artist who has garnered success by sharing her art on Instagram and Tumblr. She lives in Los Angeles where she is expanding her career as an artist.