PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- This was a great way to get across the styles of a lot of writers. The stories, all fiction, range in tone from heartwarming through to grief and each reader will find those voices that particularly resonate with them. For me these were Tara June Winch's warm story of an unusual friendship, Archie Weller's broken people, Melissa Lucashenko's story of another unusual friendship undergoing a tragic event (ripe for a screenplay), Cassie Lynch's imaginative and evocative invocation of deep time, and Jane Harrison's story of a still birth, told in blunt & stoic fashion that somewhat masks the emotional hurt of the mother telling the story. The entire collection is strong, making for enjoyable reading. Craig Kirchner
Ellen van Neerven is an award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh (South East Queensland) and Dutch heritage. They write fiction, poetry, plays and non-fiction. Ellen's first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Indigenous Writers Prize. Ellen has published two poetry collections- Comfort Food, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize and highly commended for the 2016 Wesley Michel Wright Prize; and most recently Throat, which was the recipient of the UQP Quentin Bryce Award.
ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- This was a great way to get across the styles of a lot of writers. The stories, all fiction, range in tone from heartwarming through to grief and each reader will find those voices that particularly resonate with them. For me these were Tara June Winch's warm story of an unusual friendship, Archie Weller's broken people, Melissa Lucashenko's story of another unusual friendship undergoing a tragic event (ripe for a screenplay), Cassie Lynch's imaginative and evocative invocation of deep time, and Jane Harrison's story of a still birth, told in blunt & stoic fashion that somewhat masks the emotional hurt of the mother telling the story. The entire collection is strong, making for enjoyable reading. Craig Kirchner
'Flock is a library of First Nations writing inside a single book. It's not so much about what you go looking for - van Neerven's done that work already - but what eloquent things you stumble upon. This way, or that, the collection traces the lineaments of First nations short story writing, in content and form.' --The Saturday Paper 'Flock is broad in scope and touches on all manner of life's beauty and messiness. Ultimately, it's the quality of the writing that impresses as much as the themes explored.' --Books + Publishing 'First Nations were subjected to what the African political theorist Achille Mbeube calls necropolitics: both the prospect of literal murder and the assumption that as a people we would either die out or be forcibly assimilated. Flock is a fiction collection whose existence highlights the failure of those fictions which, however briefly, once threatened its telling.' --Sydney Morning Herald
