The Bloodwood Clan

Jan Fook

Renate Klein

The best-selling book that started the series exploring the significance of animals in women’s lives. Eighty-six women and girls from all across the globe contributed to this beautiful collection of stories, letters, poems and photographs, sharing the funny, sad and amazing tales of their relationships with dogs. Readers will cry and laugh as they enjoy this homage to their best friends: dogs they’ve grown up with; dogs with incredible character; dogs who’ve changed – even saved – women’s lives.

2001 | 208 pp

Suniti Namjoshi

Aesop’s fables are brought to life by the timely intervention of Sprite from the future, who prods Aesop into debate about the meaning of stories: are they for fun, or do they have the chance to change the world? This book offers a virtuoso display into how the building blocks of fables can enchant, enrage, enlighten and educate us all.

Very little is known about Aesop who was supposed to have been a slave on the island of Samos in the sixth century BCE. It is his fables (and those attributed to him) that have come down to us through the centuries. In these tales, a fabulist from the future, referred to as Sprite, hoicks herself back to his century. “Why didn’t you save the world?” That’s the Sprite’s cry. Aesop, meanwhile, is trying to save his skin, make up his fables and live his life. Given the pitfalls of human nature, are the fables an Instruction Manual for staying out of trouble? What about morals, what about reform, what about the castigation of social evils? Sprite nags and cajoles and begins to wonder how much power a writer really has.

The book offers a virtuoso display of how the building blocks of a fable can be used in a variety of ways. It’s witty, it’s satirical and the Sprite herself is a comical figure. But at the end, when she has to return to her own time, that is to our own time and to our broken world, her central question suddenly seems less absurd, and far more urgent.

Endorsements

Suniti Namjoshi is an inspired fabulist.

—Marina Warner

Cheryl Adam

As a young unmarried mother in the 1960s, Maureen faces stifling disapproval and condemnation from mainstream society. Desperate to create a new life for herself and her baby, she rekindles an old romance and moves to South Africa under Apartheid.

But her precarious journey to Africa’s Eden is not the paradise she anticipated. Cultures smash against each other, family relationships are strained, there is death and despair, violence and injustice. But there is also humour, fun, family and friendship, as Maureen has to decide where her future lies. Is it in Africa or back home in distant Eden, in her Australian homeland?

APRIL 2022 | 292 pp

Kerryn Higgs

A Spinifex feminist classic, and winner of the Angus and Robertson manuscript prize.

Growing up in a rural working-class home, Maureen Craig rebels against her angry mother, the privileges of her favoured brother and the relentless conformity of 1950s Australia. University promises a new world both terrifying and exhilarating in its challenges. She explores her sexuality and sets out to make a place for herself in the world. Passionate, funny and heartbreaking, this remarkable novel traces a young woman’s turbulent coming of age.

Originally published under the pseudonym Elizabeth Riley. This edition includes an Introduction by Harriet Malinowitz and an Afterword by the author.

Lin Van Hek

I was a child with many aunties. The hotel was teeming with them ... I grew up with the poetry of aunties.
Lin Van Hek writes about the poetry of aunties in a novel that is at once thrilling and filled with the memories of wilful women. When Eadie Wilt disappears during the flood, everyone thinks she has drowned. But Siddy Church's granddaughter has more life to live in a household filled with stories and larger-than-life characters.

Filled with strong and unconventional women, The Ballad of Siddy Church tells of the lasting effect this larrikin mob has on the life of Edie Wilt. At the centre of the mayhem is Siddy Church.

My grandmother was a difficult woman, you could not get around it. She was born on three different occasions in three locations and she said her name was Siddy Church. Late at night she would sit like a giant curious toad, her heavy-lidded eyes turning with her head, her pupils like magic bullets about the room. Her past was too big and too diverse for her to govern, people talked about her shady past. She had relinquished her right to her own story.

1997 | 261 pp

Sefi Atta

At thirty-nine, Deola Bello, a Nigerian expatriate in London, is dissatisfied with being single and working overseas. Deola works as a financial reviewer for an international charity. When her job takes her back to Nigeria in time for her father’s five-year memorial service, she finds herself turning her scrutiny inward. In Nigeria, Deola encounters changes in her family and in the urban landscape of her home, and new acquaintances who offer unexpected possibilities. Deola’s journey is as much about evading others’ expectations to get to the heart of her frustration as it is about exposing the differences between foreign images of Africa and the realities of contemporary Nigerian life.

2012 | 222 pp

Beryl Fletcher

When Josie is sent to Digger Town to conduct her doctoral research, she knows it is a strange place with a strange history. There, the people use no modern technologies, wear nineteenth-century clothing, drive nothing faster than a horse-and-cart, and hand-make all their goods. Even so, she is not prepared for what she finds. An intriguing tale of secrecy, politics and religious and racial intolerance.

1999 | 306 pp

The Bloodwood Clan deftly mixes elements of thriller, social commentary and feminist psychology.  I'll be disappointed if it's not included in next year's Montana shortlist.

 –Iain Sharp, New Zealand Sunday Star Times

The Bloodwood Clan is ... totally engrossing. Fletcher cleverly depicts the closed nature of both communities and the inherent danger for members in maintaining secrets and lies ... this book deserves to be widely read.

 –Mary Philip, The Courier-Mail

The Bloodwood Clan is a sociological thriller in which [Fletcher's] growing experience as a writer is obvious in the tight pace of the narrative and all that is left unsaid.

 –Margie Thomson, Weekend Herald

Lucy Mushita

My only dream that’s ever come true, and one I relish with a vengeance, is being able to whistle like a man. I was told a woman fit to be married should not whistle. I don’t want to be married so the more they point at me, the louder I whistle. My load is still heavy on my head, but my heart is light, for I know, like the sun, that I shall rise every morning. Be it cloudy, cold or wet, I shall not fail to rise. And I shall whistle as loudly as I like. To me, it is the sound of freedom.

In the village where Chinongwa lives, her family, displaced from their lands, are very poor. One desperate solution to hunger is to trade young daughters into marriage. At first, to their shame, her father’s and aunt’s attempts to marry off their youngest child fail. No one is interested in this small, thin girl. Eventually, a childless woman, Amai Chitsva, offers Chinongwa as a second wife to her own husband who is old enough to be the girl’s grandfather. Chinongwa is forced to grow up very fast and rely on her survival instincts. She does her best to do what is expected of her and become a good wife and mother, but being very young, very alone, and a girl, the odds are stacked against her. Eventually, after spending her whole life doing the bidding of others, all Chinongwa wants is her independence. But how can one gain such a thing as a woman? Will she ever truly be free?

2023 | 248 pages

Laurene Kelly

The powerful sequel to the acclaimed I Started Crying Monday tells the story of fourteen-year-old Julie trying to forge a new life for herself after a family tragedy. Adapting to life in the city, without her parents, is sometimes exciting, but often overwhelming, and discovering the joys of the beach provides Julie with an escape from the ongoing dramas. At first, it seems the turmoil will never cease. And then, just as Julie begins to make some sense of what has happened, there are further surprising developments.

2001 | 119 pp

Susan Hawthorne

When Desi inherits her aunt Kate’s house in Brunswick she begins to read the contents of the boxes in the back room. She discovers a hidden life, one which could not be shared with Kate’s family.

Among the papers are records of arrest, imprisonment and torture at the hands of an unknown group who persecute her for her sexuality and activism. Scraps of memoir, family history and poems complete this fragmented story.

Can Desi find Mercedes? The woman Kate has loved so much. Mercedes, who had escaped from Pinochet’s Chile. Where is she and can she help unravel Kate’s story?

Susan Hawthorne’s dark story uncovers the hidden histories of organised violence against lesbians. She traces fear and uncertainty, and finds a narrative of resilience created through the writing of poems. The author asks: how do we pass on stories hidden by both shame and resistance to shame? A novel that is poetic and terrifying.

Finola Moorhead

When Margot Gorman finds a body in the women's toilets a tangle of mysteries opens up. Margot Gorman, ex-cop, is now a free agent, a triathlete and has the equivalent of perfect pitch in the sense of smell and, naturally, is a connoisseur of good wine. From murder and kidnap, drug dealing and gay bashing, to illegal mining and an underground network of cyberfeminists - the Solanacites - there are many skeins to be unravelled. A complex and intriguing novel that deals with the selfhood of women, it ranges from musings on the Amazons to a self-sufficient community in Australia's womenslands. There is mystery and philosophical enquiry in money, madness, motherhood and much more.

Finola Moorhead is the author of the award winning novel, Still Murder, the classic feminist novel, Remember the Tarantella and of a collection of essays and stories, Quilt.

2000 | 650 pp

Diane Bell

“Sex, silence and sin”, this is what newly appointed professor, Dee P. Scrutari, writes in her notebook as she turns her anthropological gaze on the tribe of “non-reproducing males” who dominate St Jude's, a prestigious Catholic liberal arts college. Evil is in the air. Something is awry.

What happened to the previous occupant of her newly-painted office? Professor Scrutari's fieldwork begins. Her notebooks fill. And the mystery mounts: disturbing odours that no air cleanser will disperse, turbulent faculty meetings, tenure politics, intrigue around women's bodies, and a strange ginger cat. The mix is complicated by secret student alliances, predatory priests, the end of a marriage and new love, an imperious college president, a lumbering dean, a faction-ridden Religious Studies Department, a radical mass and a dissident feminist liturgy.

The determined anthropologist doodles and decodes the symbols and signs of evil as she teams up with a band of colleagues marginalised by the department - a liberation theology nun, a gay priest, and a Jew - and three feisty women students. They strategise and sleuth as they attempt to solve a number of campus mysteries.

"Evil," Dee declares, "is visceral, pervasive, subtle, not an abstract concept at all." Evil is about now. Evil is a novel full of vivid characters you know, or want to know. It is at once funny, witty, sobering, profound and provocative; full of affection for the academic world Diane Bell so lovingly describes; and is concerned to nurture against the darker forces she seeks to identify and expose.

2005 | 290 pp