Kerryn Goldsworthy

The novel’s title is the translation of the French expression l’heure entre chien et loup, ‘the hour between dog and wolf’. It refers to twilight, the dusky hour when you can no longer see clearly and might easily mistake a dog for a wolf or vice versa. Between a wolf and a dog: the uncertain space between faithful companion and savage predator, between civilisation and wildness, darkness and light, the known and the unknown, life and death. And on the day that most of the action in this novel takes place, every main character is in such a liminal zone, a place of flux and cusp, moving through a scary transition from one state to the next.

‘Gorton’s way of seeing the world and of naming its parts is the quality that sets her debut novel apart from the mass of fiction currently being published in Australia… Most contemporary novels favour substance a long way over style, which can lead to a lot of commonplace sentences. But as one might expect from a poet, Gorton’s every sentence – and not just every sentence, but every phrase and every word – has been turned this way and that in the light of her attention and fitted to the next with the precision of a mosaicist.’ Kerryn Goldsworthy on Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses.

Written in the first person and the present tense, What Days Are For has a diary-like tone and structure, covering the twelve hospitalised days immediately following what Dessaix calls ‘the emergency’.

Throughout the book, Beudel uses a technique that approaches – and seems to be trying, humbly, to learn from – Aboriginal ways of seeing country, of the dynamic interrelatedness of people, animals, plants and the land itself, to write her own story.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is a piece of high modernism a century on, recognisable in its stream-of-consciousness ways as using a version of the techniques practised by James Joyce, and also by Virginia Woolf, who might have approved its style but would have hated its subject matter.

Australia’s first female Prime Minister is the figure at the centre of this pile of books, and they were all produced during the last few months of her Prime Ministership. They came out in quick succession… all of them had gone to press before the afternoon of June 26 when Prime Minister Julia Gillard called the leadership spill that saw the federal ALP caucus vote her out of office in favour of Kevin Rudd.

The rhetoric of the publicity campaign for the Classics series is grounded in blame and indignation about the alleged ‘neglect’ of Australian literature by publishers, editors, journalists and, most of all, academics…