This is a story about growing up in a small racist town in the Eastern Cape South Africa during the Apartheid years. The author is the oldest son of the town’s mayor a publican. He grew up between the hotel where he was exposed at an early age to much of the town’s less salubrious goings on and a harsh boarding school ......
When Matthew Larkin comes to South Australia in 1842 to join his brother James many people say he is not cut out for life on the frontier. Charming and chaotic he seems more born for poetry and the salons of London than the rough life of building a new colony. But it is his very difference that wins the heart of Lucy Bray the smart and ......
A trade unionist conceives a grand poem which will encompass his whole life since World War II. Soon he finds he must include his grandfather in 1915 his mother in Hobart in 1935 his father in Egypt with the air force George Orwell in Spain a German pilgrim some French resisters shot in 1944 Soviet sailors drowned in a sub Cole Porter ......
The Halfway House is based on my own experiences with the public and private psychiatric systems. Mental illness is a complex subject and the effects are debilitating for the sufferer close relatives friends and to society in general. This fictionalised memoir tells the story of four people who suffer with a mental illness. The ......
'David Kelly is keenly attentive to the still-life moments we can so easily all walk past. His poetry is measured and thoughtful moving fluidly along the journey of interactions with the handyman before stretching through to observations of fauna and space and haiku. But just when you think you know where he is leading he stuns with a ......
After years of living in the harsh Australian outback Iris Bloom returns with her ailing husband to her hometown in the south. Old memories surface and begin to disturb and haunt her. Iris tries to make sense of her murky past through her writing. But she discovers that dangerous writing can sometimes have fatal consequences. Fearing she might ......
The Holy Babble is a sumptuous feast for the imagination. In this Hieronymus Bosch style drive-through Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny steal the Christ myth. Panty thieves monkeys chained to word processors and rebellious talking ants inhabit decrepit fringes of the city of Moralpanik. In fact Moralpanik is all fringes and no ......
Jacky in the title story of this collection is a young descendant of pioneers and is curious about her ancestors. Jacky returns to her home town and is fascinated by the mix of characters who have settled there who are outsiders like herself and like her ancestors so long ago who were uprooted from Scotland. It is inspired by the author's ......
'This collection blends candid and personal worlds short stories allegories and vignettes. The warmth of "Knight in Shining Chain Mail" moves to the chilling short story "Undertow" with its secrets to heart-rending "The Broken Windmill". Decima does not shy away from reality with all its twists and turns of family angst defiant love ......
