What they don’t tell you in birth class is that families are the perfect container for ghosts. Intergenerational secrets? Check. Seething tensions? You bet. Profound attachment, sentimentality and love? Right here, buddy.

Three new Australian novels due out this year examine bloodlines, stubborn histories and family lore in distorted and dream-like ways. In a surreal reimagining of Tasmania, the interlocking riddles of Robbie Arnott’s Flames brim with love and grief, joy and pain. Moreno Giovannoni’s The Fireflies of Autumnthreads whispers of migration, war and love – and good and bad fortune – through a series of fable-like tales centred around San Ginese, Tuscany. And in Julia Prendergast’s The Earth Does Not Get Fat, a family grapples with suffering, intimacy and the return of the past.

For this edition of The Next Big Thing, Arnott, Giovannoni and Prendergast – and a Voiceworks contributor, to be announced – will join us at The Moat to share a taste of these exciting new works of fiction.

Presented by The Wheeler Centre.