Lemniscate
Gaynor McGrath
$29.95 AU Trade paperback
416 pages
ISBN 9780980461633
Publication date: 1 November 2008
Rights Held: World

One woman’s adventurous search for love, meaning and connection.

In the ‘70s travel scenes of Afghanistan, India and Thailand, Elsie discovers adventure, friendship and freedom. After three years she returns to her welcoming and loving family in suburban Australia where time seems to have stood still. Disenchanted with the dreary conventions of authoritarian and Catholic Adelaide she becomes a restless spirit torn between the call of family and the world. An ever-searching series of relationships and relocations ultimately takes her as single parent to live on the Greek island of Paros, until tragedy unexpectedly reconnects her with Australia and the complex truth about love and family. This is a deeply affecting, sprawling, beautiful novel about finding one’s way in life and the world.

Lemniscate: a line that travels continuously outward as it travels continuously inward.

"The odyssey of a spirited, brave and curious young woman on the 1970's ''hippie trail'' through Asia and a journey of self-discovery in a changing Australia, Lemniscate is also a tender love story, a vivid and lyrical evocation of place, and a close observation of families and society. Full of colour and character, it is an intriguing, unusual and gripping book which straddles the fertile ground between novel and autobiography with great ease."
- Sophie Masson.

"Utterly absorbing. It’s a long time since I’ve read a novel that has engaged me so fully. McGrath takes her readers on a journey that is at once deeply personal and global. I not only cared about her characters, but by the final page I cared more for the world."
- Justin D’Ath.

Gaynor McGrath grew up in Adelaide. She currently lives on the northern tablelands of New South Wales, Australia, where she works in a Rudolf Steiner school, and writes and gardens at very opportunity.

Sing, and Don’t Cry: A Mexican Journal
NEW EDITION
Cate Kennedy
$27.95 AU Trade paper back
304 pages
ISBN 9780980461640
Publication date 1 November 2008
Rights Held: World

Sing, and Don’t Cry is Cate Kennedy’ s sensual and touching evocation of her time spent working as a volunteer in small town Mexico. The people she comes to love in Tequisquiapan, and their gusto for celebration, pilgrimage and family, force her to cast a penetrating light on her own Western values and ways. ‘What is truly essential, and who is truly poor?’ asks Kennedy in a book that also challenges the reader to care more for his or her world. Described as ‘a travel book with a social conscience’ this essential memoir, from the award–winning fiction writer and poet, is funny, warm, yet ultimately disarming.

"If you're sick of being eaten to death by little stories about interest rates, then Cate Kennedy's big story of working as an Australian volunteer in a credit cooperative in Mexico is the solution. This tale of cross cultural discovery is wide-eyed and funny, unflinching and alive. It says a lot about Mexico but even more about Australia."
- Michael McGirr, author of Bypass.

"an eloquent portrait of how lived experience can inform and alter a person’s intellectual and spiritual alignment ... a profound and evocative document of a particular place."
- Kate McFadyen, Australian Book Review.

Cate Kennedy has won many awards for her poetry and short fiction, including The Age short story competition, the HQ Short Story Prize, and the Vincent Buckley Award for her first collection of poetry Signs of Other Fires (Five Islands Press, 2001). Cate is also the author of the internationally acclaimed short story collection Dark Roots (Scribe 2007). She works as a writer and editor and lives in north east Victoria, where in summer the landscape looks a little like Central Mexico, if you blur your eyes.