Around you the world is swirling - you pass through a submerged town; the bakery, a wheelbarrow, a bike floating on its side on the main street, its steeples and trees barely visible through the thick water.In the distance the wreck of the gunship HMS Elizabeth lolls on a sandbank a couple of miles from the shore. Oil slicks the canals of the capital and even now in the midst of the bombing, the old men still tell tales of mermaids in the shallows. A pool, empty of water save for a brackish puddle at one end that has escaped the summer heat. A mess of fine bones and hanks of fur - the remains of mice or possums that have tumbled in, lured perhaps by the water. Two boys stand by its edge, watching a stolen bracelet flash through the humid air into the deep end.In bestselling author Chris Womersley's first short fiction collection, twenty macabre and deliciously enjoyable tales linked by the trickle of water that runs through them all will keep readers...

Issue Three of Volume Eleven of the Review of Australian Fiction. This issue contains new short fiction by Chris Womersley and Christopher Przewloka.

Synopsis:The year is 1919 and the Great War has ended. Sergeant Quinn Walker--with a damaged body and soul from his wartime experiences--decides to return home to the small and desolate town of Flint, Australia, to set right the past. Ten years earlier, he had fled following the horrific rape and murder of his beloved younger sister Sarah--a crime that everyone, including his family, believed Quinn committed. When he arrives on the outskirts of Flint, Quinn learns the town has not escaped the deadly flu epidemic sweeping the globe. And though he is in danger of being hanged if his identity is discovered, Quinn feels compelled to convince his mother (dying of the flu) of his innocence. As he hides out, working up the courage to confront the tragedy that shattered his life, Quinn meets a mysterious orphan girl, Sadie Fox, whose powers verge on magical and who seems to know more about the evil that lives in Flint than any child should. In gorgeously spare, poetic language, Bereft tells a powerful story about love and loss in a world ravaged by war and disease.Publishers Weekly:Set in 1919 Australia, Womersley’s moving second mystery chronicles the return of Sgt. Quinn Walker, fresh from the killings fields of France, to his hometown of Flint, New South Wales, whence he fled 10 years earlier under horrific circumstances. Back then, Quinn’s father found 16-year-old Quinn in an abandoned shed next to his raped and murdered 12-year-old sister, Sarah, clutching the bloody knife used to kill her. The older Walker drew the obvious conclusion, but Quinn was able to slip away without getting arrested. Quinn now hopes, even after so much time has passed, to identify the real culprit, but first he must persuade his mother of his innocence. Womersley, who won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime Fiction for The Low Road (2007), uses lyrical language to enhance a familiar story (e.g., “he dug a hand into his tunic to touch his revolver as if it were a crucifix that, through his caresses, might alert God to his anxieties”). (July)Biography:Chris Womersley is a writer of considerable power whose first book, The Low Road, won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime Fiction. Before its publication, the manuscript was shortlisted for Victorian Premiers' Award for Unpublished Manuscript. His second novel, Bereft, won the Indie Award for best Australian novel and Book of the Year from the ABIA. It was also the runner-up for the prestigious Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for the ASL Gold Medal for Literature, the Ned Kelly Award for Fiction, and the Age Book of the Year award. Australian native Womersley is a print and radio journalist who lives in Melbourne.

Unflinching, relentless, and powerfully written, The Low Road paints a searing portrait of two desperate men thrown together by chance as they both try to flee their troubled pasts. This savage noir surprises and grips at every turn.Young petty criminal Lee wakes up in a seedy motel with a bullet in his side, a suitcase of stolen money, and only a hazy idea of how he got there. Wild, a drug-addicted doctor also taking refuge at the motel, is forced by the proprietor to save Lee's life—and move him out before the police show up. Connected by this twist of fate, the two strangers go on the lam, becoming the wariest of traveling companions. As the two men reflect on how they arrived at this point in their lives, the past pursues them in the form of an aging gangster determined to retrieve Lee's suitcase of money—and punish him for the theft.Award-winning and critically acclaimed, The Low Road seduces readers with its poetic language and unique and indelible...

'Who wants to be the same as everyone else? You don't want to be ordinary, do you?'Melbourne, 1986Tom always imagined he was adopted. At seventeen, he flees ordinariness in small-town Australia for the city and a run-down block named Cairo. There he meets Max Cheever. Enigmatic, artistic, anarchic: he liberates Tom from the bourgeois aspiration of university and draws him into his circle of dropouts and dreamers.Through the haze of parties and politics, Tom glimpses a darker side to their vie bohème. Falling under Max's spell—and in love with his wife—he is offered an extraordinary chance: to join them in the greatest art heist of the twentieth century. Among art dealers, thieves and forgers, Tom trusts only in Max. This is his family now.But of all this summer's lessons, the cruellest will be telling what is real from what is fake.In a rush of first love, risk and a search for belonging, Chris Womersley's third novel paints a two-faced...

From award-winning author Chris Womersley comes an extraordinary historical novel set in seventeenth-century Paris"One of the unrepentantly daring and original talents in the landscape of Australian fiction" Sydney Morning HeraldA woman's heart contains all things ...France, 1673. Desperate to save herself and her only surviving child from an outbreak of plague, the widow Charlotte Picot flees her village to seek sanctuary in Lyon. But, waylaid on the road by slavers, young Nicolas is stolen and his mother left for dead. Charlotte fears the boy has been taken to Paris for sale, for it is well known there is no corruption in a man's heart that cannot be found in that terrible City of Crows. Yet this is not only a story of Paris and its streets thronged with preachers, troubadours and rogues. It is also the tale of a woman who calls herself a sorceress and a demon who thinks he is a man ...