This book is inspired by anger and hope. The anger comes from watching as Australian literature is dismantled by the people charged with preserving the best of our writing for future generations. And the hope? It grows out of a sense that neither academics nor publishers will rescue our collective literary achievement—it falls to ordinary readers to do what we cannot. THE BURNING LIBRARY explores the lives and work of Australian novelists, many of whom have unjustly disappeared from the public imagination. Alarmed by the increasingly marginal status of Australian literature in the academy, Williamson has set out to reintroduce us to twenty women and men whose works we may have forgotten or missed altogether. His focus is on fiction that gives pleasure, and he is ardent in defence of books that for whatever reason sit uneasily in the present moment. Among the writers Williamson discusses are Dymphna Cusack, Elizabeth Harrower, David Ireland, Olga Masters and Gerald Murnane. THE BURNING LIBRARY is a dynamic act of reclamation inspired by Miles Franklin’s claim that a nation that fails to acknowledge its literary treasures is ‘neither preserved nor developed, but only defaced’.