Janis Spehr: 4 books

‘I’ll tell you a story that’ll knock ya socks off,’ says an old woman in Janis Spehr’s ‘Little Sheilas’, one of the thirteen compelling stories which make up her fourth collection, Flowers for the Protestants. Many of the characters in these stories face a crisis or dilemma: a woman...

Janis Spehr is a traveller and dreamer. Landscape, history and the visual arts are important starting points for her writing and her short fiction has been widely published. She is currently writing a collection of stories, The light at the edge of the sky, based on the life of the German photographer Gisele Freund

Ladies, a plate please charts the life of Elizabeth Macguire, from childhood to middle age, in her quest for identity and selfhood. Activist, lover, sister, friend, Elizabeth follows her own rebellious star, beginning in rural sixties Australia in a family fractured by a child’s death and the damaging...

Rebellious teenager Phillip is sent to live with Kate, who raised him as a child when his mother Venice was in thrall to heroin. Set in coastal Victoria and then in Paris, Sea Pictures charts Phillip’s coming of age as well as Kate’s life in her local community and her relationship with the glamorous and volatile Venice.