Books in the Unconventional Women series

When internationally renowned and self-confessed soloist Rachael Marlin comes to live with Holly and James in their Salon d’Art, everyone falls madly in love with her. Only Joy, a young doctor, sounds a note of caution when she sees Rachael’s effect on her fiancé, Matthew, and her potential to turn their little salon d’Artinto a large theatre of the absurd. As Joy anticipates, when Rachael’s affections and creative energies turn closer towards her instrument than to her hosts, she reveals herself to be not quite the promised protégé. Spurred on by Holly, all have to work quickly to meet the danger and construct a ménage in which art and, above all, honour can be satisfied.

Athena, an Australian nurse working overseas, is raped and murdered. Her father, John, must decide whether to grant clemency to her murderer, who is facing execution by beheading. Margaret, an ex-school teacher on a career change as a junior Australian Government official, is sent in to counsel and assist the grieving man. When the situation proves predictably challenging, Margaret’s daughter, Nina, provides a clarity of counsel and assistance that is so irresistibly logical it may well prove to be the most practical solution.

Helena, grand dame of the Melbourne and Sydney theatre scene, thinks she has settled nicely into a restful performance regime of comedy classics in judiciously subsidised spaces. When her somewhat intense undergraduate daughter, Emmeline, hurls an asylum seeker/detention centre drama at her, Helena’s professional certainties are shaken not so much by the play’s contents as by its lead actor, Violet. A student of Australian theatre, Violet has chosen Helena to be her mentor and she sets about procuring her idol with disturbing intensity. Besieged and exhausted by the emotional demands of these two passionate young women, Helena finds herself facing a choice between biting on the burnt chop of desire and doing something really reprehensible.

It is December 1948. While their husbands self-sacrificingly remain at work in town, Sarah and her sister-in-law Jennifer spend yet another summer by the sea, watching the children in the deep water and trying to avoid the annual judgement-by-mother-in-law at the hands of the indomitable Alice. Secret relief comes for Jennifer when she meets an older man, Henry, who listens to her and provides an occasional oasis of sanity in the midst of her holiday madness. At the same time, Sarah is determined to put their family back on track by smartening up its image and exposing its atavistic ills to the disinfectant of sunlight and the open air. When Henry is discovered to be at the centre of this family’s business, the dynamic daughters-in-law have to stand firm and defy Alice, who guards their tragedy with all the calmness of the self-justified.

Max and Marion are usually the sort of friends who can go for a year without seeing each other and catch up on everything in a second once they do. In these four strange and amusing encounters, however, something new seems to be happening. Max finds himself increasingly flummoxed by his interesting friend, as Marion plays about with various scenarios in which she side-steps work, suspends the kids and liberates her life partner while making a direct and long overdue approach towards more time meditating under the Me Tree.