Winner of the David Unaipon Award and shortlisted for the Stella Prize, Heat and Light announced Ellen van Neerven as one of the most important voices in contemporary Australian literature.

Structured in three interconnected sections—Heat, Water and Light—the book moves between realism, speculative fiction and intimate character studies, building a portrait of Indigenous life that is at once deeply local and formally adventurous.

Van Neerven's writing is remarkable for its precision. The stories carry immense emotional weight without sentimentality, attending closely to family, Country, desire, grief and survival. The collection resists easy categorisation; it sits somewhere between literary fiction, linked stories and novelistic world-building. More than a decade after publication, it remains one of the defining works of twenty-first-century Australian writing.

Ellen van Neerven is a Mununjali Yugambeh writer whose work spans fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Heat and Light has become a contemporary Australian classic, widely taught and discussed for its innovative structure, political acuity and extraordinary prose.

2015 University of Queensland Press paperback edition. Good condition with light shelf wear. Signed and warmly inscribed by the author on the title page ("For Colleen, Happy reading! Take care.") dated May 2015. Clean throughout with a solid binding.