Henry Goes Bush by Wayne Marshall
The price of genius is one hell of a hangover.
In 1892, New South Wales' most promising writer and least promising teetotaller, Henry Lawson, is banished to Bourke to 'find the real bush'. The goal: sober up, gather fresh material, and stop being such a disappointment. But what Australia's favourite literary son discovers in the river town is less a glorious national frontier than a collective nervous breakdown.
History records this as the trip that defined his career. Wayne Marshall records it as a surrealist action movie where Lawson must outrun his own myth and a gunslinger known as The Rider, aka Banjo - a poet significantly better at being a legend than Henry is.
Henry Goes Bush confronts the madness that lies behind our colonial dreaming - a moment where history is a hallucination and 'the bush' a phantasmagoric theme park. A reality in which The Bulletin's famed poetry wars are an actual shootout on the banks of the Darling River.
It turns out finding 'the real Australia' is easy; the hard part is surviving the encounter.
Rapture by Emily Maguire
The motherless child of an English priest living in ninth-century Mainz, Agnes is a wild and brilliant girl with a deep, visceral love of God. At eighteen, to avoid a future as a wife or nun, Agnes enlists the help of a lovesick Benedictine monk to disguise herself as a man and devote her life to the study she is denied as a woman.
So begins the life of John the Englishman: a matchless scholar and scribe of the revered Fulda monastery, then a charismatic heretic in an Athens commune and, by her middle years, a celebrated teacher in Rome. There, Agnes (as John) dazzles the Church hierarchy with her knowledge and wisdom and finds herself at the heart of political intrigue in a city where gossip is a powerful—and deadly—currency.
And when the only person who knows her identity arrives in Rome, she will risk everything to once again feel what it is to be known—and loved.