Bücher veröffentlicht von Debbie Lee

Steve and Linda met in a dance studio when they were teenagers. Their ballet partnership soon blossomed into romance, they married and were blessed with two daughters. Then, at the age of forty-six, Steve was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and Linda became his carer. This affecting and intimate memoir is a true and honest account of their shared experience of illness and family caregiving. It is a story of suffering, loss, and grief but also love, loyalty, and courage.

Decima Wraxall's poems mirror moods of the natural world and humanity in a rich diversity of themes and settings. Visit the magnificent and sacred monolith of Uluru in Central Australia, share its secrets. In Peru, fly over the Nazca Lines, ponder on the huge icons of a lost civilisation. Savour moving paeans, paying tribute to the courage of those facing their own mortality. Share the pain of saying goodbye, juxtaposed against the frantic dating dance - alone - by a woman past her prime. Ageing is explored in its many dimensions, with a side dish of exuberance from the very young. Reflect on hardships of the frontier days. Imagine the dispossessed watching civilisation emerge with swords and muskets, indigenous rituals and ceremonies ignored as savage. Above all, the universal shines through in this thoughtful collection.

The Holy Babble is a sumptuous feast for the imagination. In this Hieronymus Bosch style drive-through, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny steal the Christ myth. Panty thieves, monkeys chained to word processors, and rebellious talking ants inhabit decrepit fringes of the city of Moralpanik. In fact, Moralpanik is all fringes, and no exits. No one can leave this world, not even the reader, nor will you want to. Kirwan stitches this aberrant crew of characters into stories that bend and twist better than Luna Park's old rattler roller-coaster. Strap yourself in because this carriage is going off the rails and into beautiful insanity.'There is a host of freaks: wannabe vampires, headless masturbating deviants, and tortured serial killers. Much of the material is based on the Bible, or rather, The Holy Babble. Joseph thinks he is Superman. Mary is a struggling, pregnant teenager. Jesus appears in multiple forms, and his disciples are chain-smoking lunatics. All these characters are shadowed by menacing clown-like beings that seek to control and undermine free will. These interconnected short stories are darkly hilarious. They are richly woven with more than a hint of meta-fiction. I loved this book.' - Sally Harbison, writer and perpetual student'In the Heavenly Herald last week, God the Father, Sun-Tzu and the peppercorn ghost said, "The Holy Babble is either humanly honest, or honestly human. Read it!" And thus, readers, together we've risen from the word graveyard in Kirwan's first, fast-flowing multiplicity of treasures, out across the void referred to -- a tale of those words reborn as characters in a near-transparent shaving from the paper they were born on. If you enjoy your characters sad, deranged and zany - in other words reminiscent of this thing we call life - you will really enjoy Kirwan's The Holy Babble.' - John M. Wenitong, aka Pemulwuy Weeatunga, author of the Fethafoot Chronicles

Cruel, backward, isolationist, and fanatically religious-or independent, resourceful, principled, and courageous? This book is about the Boers of the Transvaal; it is about how they were formed, their relentless territorial expansion at the expense of indigenous groups in both the Cape Colony and the Transvaal, their struggle for distinctiveness and independence against Imperial and African pressures, the state that they carved out for themselves, and their abject defeat in the Anglo-Boer War. It is also about how the experiences and world view of the Transvaal Boers shaped the myth and laid the platform for 'Boerdom resurgent' (or the Afrikaner ascent) in apartheid South Africa.