Indra publishing

Valerie Kirwan’s sharp observation and sharper wit presents us with these four cameos of love loved and love lost in the last decades of the twentieth century. Local stories with universal themes, the novellas reflect the emotional roller coaster of the century of alienation.

And then there were the good nights – a novella about love, friendship and good times over two decades 1974 to 1994 – focuses on a small group of friends whose lives revolve around theatre and their relationships.

In the cold morning light – a mystery thriller and a story of elusive love. When Aysin returns alone to Charles’s isolated house without Bebe, her lover, she becomes obsessed with questions about Bebe’s fate and Charles’s role in her disappearance.

Michael – a story of illusory love – portrays a domineering mother through the eyes of Anna, her son’s girlfriend. Domination and alienation mark the bleak days spent at Michael’s mother’s house, days that culminate in Anna’s losing Michael as he withdraws into a new identity, which allows her no place in his life.

Mrs Wedge’s Waterford and a crate of champagne – a black comedy about life without love – is Lou Wedge’s story of coping with her irascible ailing mother and her own frustrated loneliness.

Feb 2001, 210pp
Paperback, 215 x 138 mm
ISBN 0 9585805 1 0
RRP $aud 20.95
Literary fiction; Novellas
ISBN-13 978

The Author
For twenty years since the mid-seventies, Valerie Kirwan was something of a legend in Melbourne theatre, writing, directing and performing plays which challenged and enchanted her audiences.

More recently, Valerie is writing novellas and short stories in which she tests her characters against the subconscious stresses that exist below the surface of our outwardly normal, everyday world. Through intrigue, suspense, and more than a little sardonic humour, Valerie challenges us to join in her psychological dramas.

Valerie’s published books
Taking A Fool to Paradise (Indra 2004)
Lovers and Losers of the Last Century (Indra 2001)
The Disease of the Silkworm (Hornets Nest 2000)
The Moon is Bloodshot (Hornets Nest 1999)
The Will to Fall (Penguin 1984)

A powerful love story that moves recklessly back and forth through time to the most intimate meetings of cultures, histories and bodies. Nicholas Jose

Gillian Hindmarsh is an Australian researcher, investigating architectural history in Penang, Malaysia. From a city archive, she souvenirs a photograph of Rose, a young English woman from the 1940s. In Gillian’s imagination, Rose is a black and white romantic fantasy taken from an old forties movie.

Rose, however, was real. She has no family name to identify her. Her ghost is seen from time to time by fisherman in the waters off Georgetown, and in 1982, when disturbed by dredging for a bridge to the mainland, she looks for a body into which to reincarnate. And she wants her lover, Li-tsieng to reincarnate also.

Wang Li-tsieng, the dissolute son of a wealthy Straits Chinese family, returned from the safety of exile in Chile, to be with his English Rose. Shortly after his return, they were killed by a bomb, as they danced in the underwater dining hall of one of the Wang family mansions in Georgetown.

Patrick Dreher, Gillian’s lover, is a dredging engineer who rents a house on Jalan Dunn, where he is disturbed by Rose’s spectral presence. Rose makes a significant choice by allowing herself to be seen by Gillian, in Patrick’s house.fishlips weaves together issues of history and memory, east and west, body and spirit, coloniser and colonised in a fiction that interrogates the ways we order both individual and collective histories to make sense of our own worlds.

In this dark romance, loss and madness hover just below the surface.

September 2001, 200 pp
Paperback, 216 x 138 mm
ISBN 0 9585805 9 6
Literary fiction; First Edition
RRP $aud 22-95
ISBN-13 978 0958580595

The Author
Carolyn van Langenberg grew up in the rural hinterland of the Far North Coast of New South Wales. She has travelled in Southeast Asia and Europe.

Carolyn’s books reflect her background in Australian and English literature, Asian history and creative writing. She lives with her husband in the Blue Mountains.

The fish lips trilogy, set in Malaysia and Australia from the 1940s to the 21st century, looks at three angles on love: heterosexual, homosexual and tortured.

In fish lips, Rose, Li-tsieng’s paramour, becomes a ghost when the Japanese bombed Penang in 1941. Was she ever real?

Fiona Hindmarsh in The Teetotaller’s Wake longs to be back with her new girlfriend during the family ceremonies that follow her mother’s death.

In Blue Moon, urban conservationist Badul Mukhapadai tries to save Penang, Malaysia, from developers and falls in love with the clean air of Byron Bay, Australia, where he consummates his passion for the prickly historian, Gillian Hindmarsh.

The Fish Lips Trilogy…by Carolyn van Langenberg

Fish Lips, 2001
$aud22.95
ISBN: 0 95858059 6

The Teetotaller’s Wake, 2003
$aud22.95
ISBN: 0 95787358 1

Blue Moon, 2004
$aud27.95
ISBN: 1 92078710 0

The third book of Carolyn van Langenberg’s Fish Lips trilogy completes the saga of a troubled farming family based in North Eastern New South Wales and their connections over two generations with families in the Malaysian island of Penang. Blue Moon, though the third title in the trilogy, is not a sequel to the prior novels.

Jacqueline Dark is a social worker specialising in emergency housing for the poor in Sydney during the 1990s. Jacq and her brother Kel hit a bad mid-life patch when memories of their rural childhood with their crazy mother Lydia destabilise them. Jacq takes stress leave to Penang in Malaysia. While there, she tries to solve the mystery of her mother’s belief that there is a family connection with Penang.

Lydia’s life is paralleled by Ng Chu Yee in Penang, Malaysia, who is also frustrated, in her case by her husband’s gambling.

Crisply written and tightly structured, Blue Moon is one of those novels that is hard to put down.

December 2004, 336 pp
Paperback, 216 x 138 mm
ISBN 1 92078710 0
Literary fiction; First Edition
RRP $aud 27-95
ISBN-13 978

The Author
Carolyn van Langenberg grew up in the rural hinterland of the Far North Coast of New South Wales. She has travelled in Southeast Asia and Europe.

Carolyn’s books reflect her background in Australian and English literature, Asian history and creative writing. She lives with her husband in the Blue Mountains.

The fish lips trilogy, set in Malaysia and Australia from the 1940s to the 21st century, looks at three angles on love: heterosexual, homosexual and tortured.

In fish lips, Rose, Li-tsieng’s paramour, becomes a ghost when the Japanese bombed Penang in 1941. Was she ever real?

Fiona Hindmarsh in The Teetotaller’s Wake longs to be back with her new girlfriend during the family ceremonies that follow her mother’s death.

In Blue Moon, urban conservationist Badul Mukhapadai tries to save Penang, Malaysia, from developers and falls in love with the clean air of Byron Bay, Australia, where he consummates his passion for the prickly historian, Gillian Hindmarsh.

The Fish Lips Trilogy… by Carolyn van Langenberg

Fish Lips, 2001
$aud22.95
ISBN: 0 95858059 6

The Teetotaller’s Wake, 2003
$aud22.95
ISBN: 0 95787358 1

Blue Moon, 2004
$aud27.95
ISBN: 1 92078710 0