The it’s-almost-Christmas giveaway #4

Alex Miller Max

The multi-award-winning novelist turns his hand to non-fiction, capturing the story of his friend and mentor, Max Blatt. Miller tracks Max’s life from the records of the Melbourne Holocaust Centre to Berlin’s Federal archives, Max’s hometown in Poland, and finally to Israel. At once a meditation on memory, friendship, and history.

Courtesy of Allen and Unwin

Cathy Perkins The Shelf Life of Zora Cross

Largely unknown today, poet Zora Cross was a sensation when, still in her 20s, she published the bestselling Songs of Love and Life in 1917. Frankly erotic by the standards of the time, her poems were compared to the sonnets of Shakespeare and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and she was called ‘an Australian Sappho’.

Cathy Perkins’s lively biography returns Zora to her place as an important figure in Australian literature in the early decades of the 20th century. You can read an extract here.

Courtesy of Monash University Publishing

Meg Keneally The Wreck

The new novel from the author of Fled.

London, 1820: fleeing arrest for her part in a failed rebellion, Sarah McCaffrey boards the Serpent, bound for the colony of New South Wales. When the ship is dashed onto Sydney’s notorious rocks, Sarah is the only survivor and must make a new life for herself. But then her past follows her across the seas …

Courtesy of Echo Publishing

SR White Hermit

A new voice in Australian crime fiction.

After the puzzling death of a shopkeeper in rural Australia, troubled detective Dana Russo has just 12 hours to interrogate the prime suspect – a silent, inscrutable man found at the scene of the crime, who simply vanished 15 years earlier.

‘Original, compelling and highly recommended. SR White is the real deal.’ – Chris Hammer

Courtesy of Hachette Australia