Readings.com.au: World Fantasy Awards 2009 Winners

Tales From Outer Suburbia

CBCA Older Readers Book of the Year 2009

Do you remember the water buffalo at the end of our street?

Or the deep-sea diver we found near the underpass?

Do you know why dogs bark in the middle of the night?

Shaun Tan, creator of The Arrival, The Lost Thing and The Red Tree, reveals the quiet mysteries of everyday life: homemade pets, dangerous weddings, stranded sea mammals, tiny exchange students and secret rooms filled with darkness and delight.

Tender Morsels

Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. It is a tale of journeys and transformations, penetrating the boundaries between male and female, reality and myth, conscious and unconscious, temporal and spiritual, human and beast From girl to witch to woman. From boy to beast to man. From hell to heaven to the real world.

Liga is a young peasant girl of no consequence. Abused by her father (who plies her with potions to induce miscarriages that destroy all evidence of his shame), then raped by callous youths, she has two beautiful babies. One day she is saved by natural magic and, in exchange for her earthly life, her world is changed into her own personal Heaven, given to her by natural magic. Safe in this nurturing world, Liga builds a life of loving domesticity for her daughters, gentle Branza and curious Urdda, who grow up there, protected from all that once harmed Liga: violence, sexual predation and village prejudice. What is this potent place? Is it the idealized world of Liga's imagination, a shared unconscious, or the realm of myth and magic?

But back in the real world, hedge-witch Muddy Annie, begged by a desperate, debt-ridden friend, tries sending him to his own Heaven. Her botched attempt puts him instead into the world of Liga and her daughters, and gives him on arrival the power to turn wildflowers to coins, frog-eggs to pearls, tiny birds to precious stones and to pass back into the real world with the wealth he gathers. But his numerous journeys create perforations in the skin between the real world and the magic world.

Although these generally have no effect, on Bear Day every spring the fur-costumed Bears running the ritual chase through the village sometimes tumble through, transformed from lusty young men into real, wild bears in Liga's Heaven.

How far can you take your fantasies before they grow dangerous? How fully can you protect your children, and how completely should you? Built on a mythic scaffolding, Tender Morsels asks timeless questions about what it is to be human, and explores the evil and sweetness in the world and reveals the essential magic of learning to live with both.

A long-awaited novel from an author acclaimed for the fearless range of her imagination, the emotional intensity of her stories, and the virtuosity of her writing.

A story of astonishing beauty, originality and power.

Paper Cities: An Anthology Of Urban Fantasy

The city has always been a place of mystery, of magic, and wonder. In cities past, present, and future, in metropoli real and imagined, meet mutilated warrior-women, dead boys, mechanical dogs, escape artists and more. From the dizzying heights of rooftops and spires to the sinister secrets of underpasses and gutters, some of the most talented authors writing today will take you on a trip through the urban fantastic. Edited by Ekaterina Sedia, author of The Secret History of Moscow and Alchemy of Stone.

Twenty-one original stories from Forrest Aguirre, Barth Anderson, Steve Berman, Darin Bradley, Stephanie Campisi, Hal Duncan, Mike Jasper, Vylar Kaftan, Jay Lake, Paul Meloy, Richard Parks, Ben Peek, Cat Rambo, Jenn Reese, David Schwartz, Cat Sparks, Anna Tambour, Mark Teppo, Catherynne M. Valente, Greg van Eekhout, and Kaaron Warren.

The Shadow Year

On New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy spends much of his free time in the basement of his family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with figurines representing friends and neighbors. Their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her siblings, moves around the inanimate clay residents.

There is a strangeness in the air as disappearances, deaths, spectral sightings, and the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car mark this unforgettable shadow year. But strangest of all is the inescapable fact that all these troubling occurrences directly cor-respond to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in their basement.

The Drowned Life

There is a town that brews a strange intoxicant from a rare fruit called the deathberry—and once a year a handful of citizens are selected to drink it. . . .

There is a life lived beneath the water—among rotted buildings and bloated corpses—by those so overburdened by the world's demands that they simply give up and go under. . . .

In this mesmerizing blend of the familiar and the fantastic, multiple award-winning New York Times notable author Jeffrey Ford creates true wonders and infuses the mundane with magic. In tales marked by his distinctive, dark imagery and fluid, exhilarating prose, he conjures up an annual gale that transforms the real into the impossible, invents a strange scribble that secretly unites a significant portion of society, and spins the myriad dreams of a restless astronaut and his alien lover. Bizarre, beautiful, unsettling, and sublime, The Drowned Life showcases the exceptional talents of one of contemporary fiction's most original artists.