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David Brelsford is a shameless dog lover as is evident in many of his short stories. He is currently the joint owner (with his wife) of a gentle springer spaniel, but has fantasies of one day owning a Bernese mountain dog. He has undertaken charity runs to raise funds for motor neurone disease, but at 81 his running days are over. He now contents himself with being a mad keen square dancer. He has three sons and four lovely grandchildren. He also loves classical music and does part-time work for the homeless.

It's a hot Australian summer and eleven-year-old Bridie is on holiday with her family at her Aunt and Uncle's dairy farm on the south coast. The farm is a haven for Bridie who revels in the lushness of the green paddocks dotted with Friesian cows and the tang of the ocean breezes that float over the hill. But this summer, Bridie's idyllic childhood is under threat. She grapples with shame and confusion over the unwanted advances of her brother's friend. She feels the sting of abandonment by her longtime holiday bestie. And she longs to shake off her big sister responsibilities to June, for whom she feels equal parts envy and protectiveness. And then there's the horse in Uncle Evan's shed. Bridie dreams of having the magnificent creature to herself, but her efforts to bring that dream to reality have disastrous consequences. Bluebottle Poison explores the fraught mindscape of an eleven-year-old girl trying to find her place in a world where calamity lurks around every corner.

This book comprises the wartime recollections of my parents, Maria (née Keil) and Leon Sokulsky, who lived under Nazi rule during the Second World War. Their accounts as I was growing up always fascinated me and fostered my love for history. For that reason, I decided to interview my parents so that we could keep for posterity a record of their experiences. The interviews occurred in 1998 at our family home in Elermore Vale, a suburb of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia. I recorded them separately on two C90 cassette tapes. Mum and Dad passed away in 2011 and 2014, respectively, but it was not until late 2018 when rummaging through my old cassette collection that I came across the recordings that had lain there in a box for nearly thirty years. It was then that I decided, for the first time since the interviews, to listen to them. As I sat there with headphones on at my home in Muswellbrook, in northern New South Wales, I found myself transported into the past - not just to 1998 but back to the 1920s. It was an eerie and emotional experience to hear my parents speak again. I knew then that I needed to write down what they had said.

Joanna van Kool obtained a Masters in Creative Writing from Sydney University and has been writing in various forms for many years. Inspired by John Sinclair, the man who fought to save Fraser Island from sand mining, this coming-of-age novel is set in the 1970s and is about the clash between those who wish to exploit the island's mineral wealth and those who want to protect its natural beauty. This struggle is interwoven with the lives of three characters: an elderly artist, Jim; a nineteen-year-old local girl, Tracey; and Steve, an eighteen-year-old who has run away from home and is keen to prove his independence. It has been said that Joanna's writing shows a sensitivity towards the natural world, but her dialogue is so real as to be almost heard by the reader.

'The poetry of Keith MacNider is like a ground spring, rising from deep within and lifting the reader to the airy grace of rivers, trees, stones, clouds, and to our human connection to the past and to the land. As a boy in Hong Kong, Keith spent hours lying in grassy fields, looking at the clouds - thinking, and listening to the language of the natural world. Words, songs and the human voice captivated Keith and have brought him to the art of poetry as a medium to express the spiritual links between stories, memories and nature. The poetry in this, Keith's first collection, represents the lifework of an outstandingly talented, worldly poet, who has published many individual poems across the globe. A seasoned traveller and experience seeker, Keith's quests for natural beauty and ethereal knowledge have taken him to the green hills of Connemara in Ireland, the rocky and holy paths of the Navajo people in Arizona, to England, Canada, Hawaii and Australia. The poems in Connemara Greening tickle us awake to witness the gentle power of humanity in our shared and ancient psyche.' - Jude Aquilina

Virgilio Goncalves has worked out, finally, why he has a nomadic bent. It's because a lot of the time he's seeking the tribe that truly typifies him. Is he South African, Australian or Portuguese? Place has loomed like a restless shadow in his life. But which of the three countries to which he has ties is the one most a part of him? This collection looks at poems written in, or about, the three lands which tug at his heartstrings for captaincy status in his multicultural life. He also comes to the realisation that, despite this agitation about Place, he considers himself fortunate. Virgilio no longer works as a journalist, lecturer, ESL teacher or tennis coach. Instead, he writes. So far, two novels, two collections of poetry and a book of short stories. All this alphabet play nourishes him. At each day's end, he's grateful he's had the chance to jiggle fingers on to yielding keys and see words come into being, as if by magic. 'A memorable and special poetry collection.' - Jude Aquilina

The rich, the powerful, the influential and the innovators do not have a monopoly on life's tales. Theirs may be more glamorous and inspiring, but failure is as much part of human existence as success, and the fear of one is just as motivating as the striving for the other, and much may be learned from both. This is the story of Natalia, my mother. You could call her an ordinry person but I'm not sure exactly what that means or how it is measured. Hers has not been an easy story to write - I have heard Freud's rumblings the entire time. It is a personal story and I have been critical of Natalia but I hope it is of value.

'It struck me at some point when reading Maurice Whelan's Thought: The Invisible Essence that thinking, a bit like reading, writing and dreaming, is not framed often enough as conversation. As readers, when we're lucky, we enter into dialogue with the writer, and when fruitful, the conversation continues long after the book is finished. This poetic and meditative book offers an unhurried, deep analytic conversation with Maurice, as he wanders through the question of what it is to have a mind and to use it.' - Charlie Stansfield Maurice Whelan, psychoanalyst, poet, novelist, non-fiction writer, travels down many paths and asks the reader to travel with him. The places he offers are real and imagined: William Hazlitt's English countryside, John McGahern's Ireland's lanes and hedgerows; Shakespeare's island in The Tempest, Richard Dyer's poetic kingdom of the mind. And more. All places become spaces to the extent we are willing to explore them. Some journeys are not easy. Whelan uses his knowledge of Irish history, of the internal workings of the Catholic church and his lifetime experiences as a social worker and psychoanalyst, to interrogate the scandal of clerical child sexual abuse. He highlights an abject failure to think about the damage done to children, to their minds, hearts and souls. While content to wander, Whelan has the real business of living in his sights. He sees an appreciation of the essence of thought as necessary to maintain and improve the living of any life.

'This powerful collection leads readers through the harrowing reality of losing everything to bushfire. Broughton experienced the unimaginable. In one terrifying day, she and her husband lost everything: the home where they'd raised a family, all her memorabilia, her journals, all their artwork. And the landscape she'd loved and tended for over forty years was burned beyond recognition. Using a lyrical mix of free verse, Japanese form and prose poetry, this important collection explores loss and renewal on physical, spiritual and ecological levels. Intimately observed and heartbreakingly philosophical, Broughton creates a clear-eyed self-portrait of a woman gently tending hope even within the maelstrom of sorrow. Finding strength in the resilience of her bushland home, Broughton creates a lyrical personal history that speaks of what it means to lose everything, yet still trust in family, community and the natural world to sustain her through the darkest of times.' - Rachael Mead

This collection of short and 'micro' stories arises from imagination working on snippets of ideas gleaned across the times and places of my life. Many have an underlying autobiographical origin, but even these are fictionalised. They are not intended as a factual record, but as places where your thoughts, like mine, can come to play and dance. If you find at the end of a busy day that just a few minutes of reading are sufficient to leave the day's thoughts behind and induce sleep, then these stories are for you.

'In the tanka tradition, Amelia shares the personal in her life, yet offers her human adventure in a universal manner. Her readers will recognise their own lives in the specifics of the life Amelia has shared in her tanka. Also, she respects the tanka tradition of writing lyrical poems. Read out loud her tanka for yourself and/or recite for loved ones and friends so that you (and they) will hear the song-like quality of her verse.' - Neal Whitman

The rewriting of prose texts in iambics is perhaps primarily a way of reading them with deliberation; the texts here - favourites of course - have much in common. Those from Lampedusa posit the possibility of extraordinary events. Similarly, 'Sylvie' depends on extremities of tenderness exemplified by the scene in the Othys section when the narrator and Sylvie, descending the stairs, stage a re-enactment. And in the scene from Dali's novel Hidden Faces there is something in common with the luminous return to life near the end of The Count of Monte Cristo (which itself has echoes of the rapt statue scene in The Winter's Tale). To render these theatrical interludes in verse is of course an indulgence but also, it is hoped, a tribute and an invitation.

Here and There is Joanna van Kool's second poetry collection. When copies of her first collection, Now and Then, reached England, some readers there said she was sometimes too confrontational, but that is exactly what she intended. She has a keen sense of injustice to both humans and animals and encourages others to maintain the rage towards man's often apathetic indifference. At times she appears to see the world through different eyes and is sadly disappointed by what she finds. She glories in the natural world and finds great joy in its beauty, but says she is often frustrated by her inability to find the right words to capture its magic. It is clear that Joanna especially loves both trees and birds and she has said that without those marvels our lives would be depressingly grey and empty. Joanna believes that poetry, unlike a novel, should be read in small bites, with each poem given time for digestion and thought. She hopes that this current offering gives pleasure and reason to pause for thought.

This is Ron's first book. It took a while to get up the courage but he's pretty proud of it. The poems flow from seventy years of experience: farming childhood, love and sex, and travels of the world, of the word and of the mind.