Readings.com.au: Sleepers Publishing

What The Family Needed

"Okay, tell me which do you want: to be able to fly or to be invisible?"

And so begins the tale of one particularly gifted family as it finds itself. Following his acclaimed debut, Things We Didn't See Coming, Amsterdam lets each member speak, opening up an intimate wilderness.

From a mystified teenager to an over-tired night nurse to a conflicted exile, he captures their secrets over thirty years, the many voices revealing an uneasy peace. The surprising strengths they each find show them how to change their lives - and what the family needs in order to survive.

Life Kills

“It was just one of those girly little fights we have my precious little sparkles my little fudgy wudgy bunnikins so drop the gun my little sparkles dear cos i know it isn’t loaded and i hate to break it to ya honey child but this one is.”

Life Kills follows the dark journey and twisted mind ravines of a mysterious unnamed terrorist as he goes about his business. On his flight, stewards Bubbles and Sparkles, pilots Brad and Chad, and a bunch of burnt out z-list hackster celebrities face their own particular brands of demons. Our terrorist antihero faces terrible choices along the way, torn between burning passion and mindless passivity; and throughout, the Inflight Infotainment system lurks, ever present but becoming a more powerful and sinister force as the story unfolds. Life Kills is a unique work of dark and comedic avant-garde literary fiction, in the mode of Hunter S Thompson crossed with Kinky Friedman. In it, our protagonist is out to kill some noxious rockstars to prevent them from their pathetic talent-vacuumed futures. But it’s not as easy to hijack a plane as he might have thought… In short snapshots, Life Kills ridicules the many contradictions in the way people live their lives, with an authentic humour that belies the anger boiling beneath the surface. For hipsters, boomers, and anything in-between.

“A decadently funny and unnervingly original exploration of a civilisation in decline.” – Helen Elliott

This Too Shall Pass

"It should be known, if you treat the symptom rather than always concentrating on the cause, paths for recovery can be opened up. The deepest of problems can be cleared." "You could say I'm a walking mirage, a hologram that from certain angles you can't see, and before my powers of reasoning dissolve - before I vanish altogether - I'm going to attempt to take stock."

Jen Montgomery's life appears, almost suddenly, to be at an impasse. Nothing is as secure or as certain as she had previously thought. Love, marriage, parenthood, family, work, the very fabric of he ridentity, seems to be shifting. She had always considered herself a 'forever' person but now she isn't so sure, and this is frightening and exhilarating. As Monty struggles to reconcile her inescapable desire to break free with the loyalty she feels to the choices she has made, an unravelling takes place and reality sets in.

Reminiscent of early Helen Garner, This Too Shall Pass is a quiet, powerful novel that explores the shifting nature of a human being's life, and the ways in which we come undone and do ourselves back up again.

Glissando: A Melodrama

When it comes to looking back over his life, Archie Fliess has got some understanding to do. So begins a sprawling reflection on Archie's life during the early twentieth century, starting the day the fortunes of Archie and brother Reggie change when they are taken to be the rightful owners of the property built by their grandfather in country NSW. Along their journey, they are introduced to an odd collection of family and caretakers who don't always have the best interests of the boys at heart. Archie becomes embroiled in the mystery surrounding his grandfather's life, and as the two stories Archie's and his grandfather's unravel, we see familiar themes of disappointment and failed ambition. Glissando is a tale that travels along many threads, told in a playful, philosophical voice reminiscent of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, with shades of Patrick White's Voss. It's an Australian classic, a satirical romp of epic proportions.

Read Jo Case's interview with David Musgrave about Glissando.

The Philanthropist

This novel centres on Charles Bradshaw, an ageing tycoon haunted by his past. When he suffers a heart attack, he abruptly retires and announces that he will give his fortune to charity. This leads to conflict with his wife and adult children. A terrible secret from his past comes back, along with an old girlfriend.

Unnerved by their renewed affection for each other, Charles and Anna struggle to overcome their remorse and to make amends, but tension inevitably flares. Meanwhile, Charles's son is taking over the company, he is intoxicated with his newfound power, and Charles might have to intervene to save him from self-destruction.

This is the first novel from widely travelled melbourne musicologist and barrister John Tesarsch.

The Danger Game

With preoccupations reminiscent of Elliot Perlman, The Danger Game is a work of literary realism, told through three voices in a pared-back style laced with black humour.

The Danger Game is at once an unsentimental account of deprivation and resistance, and a critique of the human cost of untrammelled economic rationalism. Another outstanding novel from a leading small publisher of Australian fiction.

Read Rebecca Starford's interview with Kalinda Ashton about The Danger Game.

Sold

Money. Lust. Real estate.

Sold takes a fly-on-the-wall look at Melbourne’s property industry. Set in the leafy, prosperous inner suburbs, it follows the fortunes and misfortunes of three agents as they jostle, thrive and try to survive.

It reveals the routines, the agents’ listing tricks and the subtle intimidation used to motivate staff and prospective vendors at Prender and Prender Real Estate.

Failed AFL footballer, Will Pittman, now a junior agent, is looking for redemption. Former Auckland car dealer Harry ‘The Fox’ Osbourne just wants to pay the kids’ school fees.

And Dally Love, the smiling assassin, wants it all: money, the girl, and the warm glow that comes from being seen as a good bloke.

Then there’s Gerard. Mentally disabled, homeless, possibly dangerous. He’s like a scud missile with a busted radar. And he’s squatting in an old convent that’s about to be turned into luxury apartments...

Things We Didn't See Coming

It’s the anxious eve of the millennium. The car is packed to capacity, and as midnight approaches, a family flees the city in a fit of panic and paranoid, conflicting emotions.

The ensuing journey spans decades and offers a sharp-eyed perspective on a hardscrabble future, as a boy jettisons his family and all other ties in order to survive as a journeyman in an uncertain landscape. By turns led by love, larceny, and a new sexual order, he must avoid capture and imprisonment, starvation, pandemic, and some particularly bad weather.

In Things We Didn’t See Coming, Steven Amsterdam links together nine luminous narratives through the mind of one peripatetic and resourceful wanderer who always has one eye on the exit door and the other on a future that shifts more drastically and more often than anyone would like to imagine.

"Something very strange happens upon finishing Steven Amsterdam's (remarkably assured and kind of masterful) stories: what should be a bum trip through a variety of dystopias – foodless worlds; heartless periods of ceaseless rain and savagery; breakouts of peace and plenty marked by venality and ambition; biblical pestilence and illness – ends up anything but; one puts down the book feeling something close to hope. Perhaps it's the life-is-long, cyclical wisdom of it all, maybe it's a new-found appreciation for the Here And Now, although I'm inclined to think it's just gratitude that there are such writers around." -David Rakoff