In ‘Water’, a futuristic world is imagined and the fate of a people threatened. In ‘Light’, familial ties are challenged and characters are caught between a desire for freedom and a sense of belonging.Heat and Light presents an intriguing collection while heralding the arrival of an exciting new talent in Australian writing.

     Brothers cease speaking to each other, husbands abandon wives and children, grown men are haunted by childhood fears. People struggle against the weight of their own history and try to reconcile themselves to their place in the world. With extraordinary insight and tenderness, Winton explores the demons and frailties of ordinary people whose lives are not what they had hoped.

    Each narrator also pays homage to an author who has written imaginatively about animals during much the same time span: Henry Lawson, Colette, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy, Günter Grass, Julian Barnes, and others.These stories are brilliantly plotted, exquisitely written, inevitably poignant but also playful and witty. They ask us to consider profound questions. Why do animals shock us into feeling things we can't seem to feel for other humans? Why do animals allow authors to say the unsayable? Why do we sometimes treat humans as animals, and animals as humans? Can fiction help us find moral meaning in a disillusioned world?Ceridwen Dovey is a prodigiously gifted storyteller, an insightful thinker, and a prose writer of great range. Each of the storylines is an opening to a new way of considering the nature of violence and the relationship between human and animal experiences of the world. Only The Animals will ask you to believe again, just for a moment, in the redemptive power of reading and writing fiction.

    She is touring the east coast of Australia during August.Tara’s first novel, Swallow the Air, was published in 2006 and won the David Unaipon Prize as well as a plethora of other literary awards. Tara was hailed as one of Australia’s finest young writers and her book became part of the HSC syllabus.After the Carnage is another unforgettable work of fiction – this time a collection of stories about characters living all over the world, from New York to Istanbul and from Pakistan to Australia.Tara’s characters are living at a distance, displaced from their countries, marriages, families, friends and even identities. They are struggling with feelings of loss and of being adrift, trying to reconcile their dreams with reality.A single mother resorts to extreme measures to protect her young son. A Nigerian student undertakes a United Nations internship in the hope of a better future. A recently divorced man starts a running group with members of an online forum for recovering addicts.PRAISE FOR TARA JUNE WINCH‘Her writing is raw and sparky, her prose so charged with energy that it bursts, Melville-like, into occasional poetic firestorms.’ Age‘The quality of her writing, her eye for the miniature of life, fleshes out both place and persona, and ultimately guides the reader’s entry into her action. She is gifted.’ Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate (Literature)TARA JUNE WINCH is an Australian writer based in France. She has written essay, short fiction and memoir for Vogue, Vice, McSweeney’s, and various Australian publications and anthologies. Her first novel, Swallow the Air, was published in 2006 and won numerous literary awards, including the David Unaipon Award and a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. It has been on the education and HSC syllabus for Standard and Advanced English in Australia since 2009. In the same year she was awarded the International Rolex Mentor and Protégé Award that saw her work under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka.

    In the magnificent opening story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," a young writer is urged by his friends to mine his father's experiences in Vietnam--and what seems at first a satire of turning one's life into literary commerce becomes a transcendent exploration of homeland, and the ties between father and son. "Cartagena" provides a visceral glimpse of life in Colombia as it enters the mind of a fourteen-year-old hit man facing the ultimate test. In "Meeting Elise," an aging New York painter mourns his body's decline as he prepares to meet his daughter on the eve of her Carnegie Hall debut. And with graceful symmetry, the final, title story returns to Vietnam, to a fishing trawler crowded with refugees, where a young woman's bond with a mother and her small son forces both women to a shattering decision. Brilliant, daring, and demonstrating a jaw-dropping versatility of voice and point of view, "The Boat" is an extraordinary work of fiction that takes us to the heart of what it means to be human, and announces a writer of astonishing gifts.

     When Jo Breen uses her divorce settlement to buy a neglected property in the Byron Bay hinterland, she is hoping for a tree change, and a blossoming connection to the land of her Aboriginal ancestors. What she discovers instead is sharp dissent from her teenage daughter, trouble brewing from unimpressed white neighbours and a looming Native Title war between the local Bundjalung families. When Jo unexpectedly finds love on one side of the Native Title divide she quickly learns that living on country is only part of the recipe for the Good Life. Told with humour and a sharp satirical eye, Mullumbimby is a modern novel set against an ancient land.

    From a powerful new voice in international fiction, this prize-winning collection of stories crosses the world—from Africa, London, the West Indies, and Australia—and expresses the global experience.Maxine Beneba Clarke gives voice to the disenfranchised, the lost, and the mistreated in this stunning collection of provocative and gorgeously wrought stories that will challenge you, move you, and change the way you view this complex world we inhabit.Within these pages, a desperate asylum seeker is pacing the hallways of Sydney’s notorious Villawood detention centre; a seven-year-old Sudanese boy has found solace in a patchwork bike; an enraged black militant is on the war-path through the rebel squats of 1960s Brixton; a Mississippi housewife decides to make the ultimate sacrifice to save her son from small-town ignorance; a young woman leaves rural Jamaica in search of her destiny; and an Australian schoolgirl loses her way.In the bestselling tradition of novelists such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Marlon James, this urgent, poetic, and essential work is the perfect introduction to a fresh and talented voice in international fiction.

    They leave the city, fleeing a past and a future that fill then with fear. On the coast they discover a natural world that is both destructive and rejuvenating. Events sweep them up and they must confront what they have tried to put behind them.Veritgo is an enthralling short novel by one of Australia's leading writers.

    A young girl sees ghosts from her third eye, located where her belly button should be. A corporate lawyer feels increasingly disconnected from his job in a soulless 1200-storey skyscraper. And a one-dimensional yellow man steps out from a cinema screen in the hope of leading a three-dimensional life, but everyone around him is fixated only on the color of his skin. Welcome to Portable Curiosities. In these dark and often fantastical stories, Julie Koh combines absurd humour with searing critiques on modern society, proving herself to be one of Australia’s most original and daring young writers.

    Luke Carman’s first book of fiction is about to change all that: a collection of monologues and stories which tells it how it is on Australia’s cultural frontier. His young, self-conscious but determined hero navigates his way through the complications of his divorced family, and an often perilous social world, with its Fobs, Lebbos, Greek, Serbs, Grubby Boys and scumbag Aussies, friends and enemies. He loves Whitman and Kerouac, Leonard Cohen and Henry Rollins, is awkward with girls, and has an imaginary friend called Tom. His sensitivity in a tough environment makes life difficult for him – he is anything but an elegant young man. Carman’s style is packed with thought and energy: it captures the voices of the street, and conveys fear and anger, beauty and affection, with a restless intensity.

    Each one a perfect piece, together they showcase Garner’s mastery of the form.

    Lives will be destroyed, families will be torn apart. Trust will be broken.When the war is over, some will return to a changed world. Will they discover that glory is a lie?Claire G. Coleman's new novel takes us to a familiar world to ask what we have learned from the past. The Old Lie might not be quite what you expect.

    Coleman, Omar Sakr, Future D. Fidel, Karen Wyld, Khalid Warsame, Kaya Ortiz, Roanna Gonsalves, Sarah Ross, Zoya Patel, Michelle Law and Hannah Donnelly. Edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad. Original concept by Lena Nahlous.Published by Affirm Press in partnership with Diversity Arts Australia and Sweatshop Literacy Movement.

    They tell of corporate betrayals and lost opportunities, and of the obsessions, hopes, fears, and vagaries of desire.

    In playful, musical prose, the book explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers.The novel's hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful and eager to please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining them hunting whales, tilling the land, exploring the hinterland and establishing the fledgling colony. He is even welcomed into a prosperous local white family where he falls for the daughter, Christine, a beautiful young woman who sees no harm in a liaison with a native.But slowly – by design and by accident – things begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the colony is developing. Stock mysteriously start to disappear; crops are destroyed; there are "accidents" and injuries on both sides. As the Europeans impose ever stricter rules and regulations in order to keep the peace, Bobby's Elders decide they must respond in kind. A friend to everyone, Bobby is forced to take sides: he must choose between the old world and the new, his ancestors and his new friends. Inexorably, he is drawn into a series of events that will forever change not just the colony but the future of Australia...