In the year 2000, an Australian woman travels to The Hague to work as the secretary for an Australian judge. There, she sits through the trial of a former military man who has been charged with war crimes. As the trial proceeds, she is confronted with two conflicting impulses: being deeply affected by the testimony of witnesses, while at the same time plagued by an enduring doubt as to the defendant's guilt.Meanwhile, she begins an unexpected romance and friendship, and these relationships help her to understand the stories of extraordinary survival she hears about during the trial. When she is called back to Australia to reckon with her own childhood, she finds she can't quite leave everything she's heard behind. Out of the Woods asks what it means to bear witness to the suffering of people who have experienced real tragedy and whether it is possible, afterwards, to resume a normal life.'A triumph. Out of the Woods traces...

The Crying Room movingly explores family boundaries and stories, finding original ways to express the contradictory experience of belonging to a family, and being an individual at the same time.When Bernie Rodgers and her husband move to the coastal town of Ballina, she finds that there is more than a physical distance separating her from her adult daughters. Bernie loves her daughters, but the problem she realises is with the way she loved them.Bernie's daughter Susie is professionally successful, but her feelings remain distant, even to herself. When she takes on the responsibility for caring for her niece, the pieces of her life finally snap into place. The inexplicable disappearance of an aeroplane though, plunges her life into mystery once again.Morally acute and dazzlingly accomplished, this is an affecting novel about loneliness, love, family and the need to feel.'Deeply rewarding. Shirm dances with a light step across the delicate territory between laughing...

Shirm is a writer of deft skill. Her prose is gentle, uncluttered, and suffused with a compassionate, clear-eyed intelligence. Delicate, restrained and sensitive, Where the Light Falls is nonetheless steadfast in its examination of our responsibilities as artists, and as people'. Peggy Frew, author of Hope Farm'In lean, elegant prose Shirm explores the silences and mysteries that shape the artist's mind and work. The novel's landscapes are vivid and charged - the mystical Lake George, the frozen streets of a scarred Berlin. Against these atmospheric backdrops guilt and regret, memory and sensation, art and life collide. Through her acutely observed portrait of Andrew, Shirm asks how deeply the artist must know himself before he can make art from the lives of others.' Mireille Juchau, author of The World Without UsAndrew, a photographer compelled by 'the honesty in broken things', returns to Australia when he hears that his former girlfriend has disappeared....