Australian Fiction 2008
A Fraction Of The Whole
$24.95 (Paperback book / Penguin Books )
Meet the Deans.
Heroes or criminals?
Crackpots of visionaries?
Relatives or enemies?
It's a simple family story...
From the New South Wales bush to bohemian Paris, from sports fields to strip clubs, from the jungles of T... More »
Review
Murder On The Apricot Coast
$21.95 (Paperback book / Allen & Unwin )
After the murder, suspense and corruption that plagued the beginning of their relationship in The Apricot Colonel, Cassandra and the colonel are relieved to be happily ensconced in newly wedded bliss. Not for long though... More »
The Comfort Of Figs
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Univ Queensland Pr )
As a burgeoning city emerges from its landscape, so too does a bridge that will transform it from a sleepy country town. Three young men work on the construction of this iconic steel bridge. Labouring high above the rive... More »
The Solemn Lantern Maker
$26.95 (Paperback book / Pier )
Ten-year-old Noland, a mute lantern maker, imagines that he sees an angel falling from the sky to the slums where he lives. But it’s only an American tourist who is caught in a drive-by shooting of a political journalist... More »
The Spare Room
$29.95 (Hardcover book / Text Publishing )
An extraordinary work of fiction from one of Australia's best-selling and most admired writers
Helen prepares her spare room for her friend Nicola, who is flying down from Sydney for a three-week visit. But this is no or... More »
Review
The Biographer
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Vintage )
Greer Gordon lives in Italy with Mischa Svoboda, a driven Czech-born painter with a booming international reputation. She and Mischa met in the 1970s, when his debut show at the small Melbourne art gallery where Greer th... More »
Review
The Good Parents
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Vintage )
Maya de Jong, an eighteen-year-old country girl from the West, comes to live in Melbourne and starts an affair with her boss, the enigmatic Maynard Flynn, whose wife is dying of cancer. When Maya's parents, Toni and Jaco... More »
The God Of Speed
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Allen & Unwin )
Film mogul, aviator, addict, inventor, visionary, recluse, serial womanizer, political meddler: Howard Hughes was one of the strangest and most significant figures of the twentieth century. His obsessive-compulsive disor... More »
Review
The Dark Lantern
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Scribe Publications )
Victorian England comes to atmospheric life in a nineteenth-century home turned upside down when two women's dark secrets are revealed.
The Bentley's London household is in flux. The elderly matron is on her deathbed, so... More »
Review
The Lifeboat
$23.95 (Paperback book / Univ Queensland Pr )
A man and a woman are found at sea in pirate-infested waters with no memory of who they are or how they got there. They are entrusted to the care of a young interpreter who is given two weeks to discover their identities... More »
Review
Cliffs Of Fall
$25.95 (Paperback book / St Martins )
From the author of "The Great Fire," a collection of stories about love and acceptance, expectations and disappointmentShirley Hazzard's stories are sharp, sensitive portrayals of moments of crisis. Whether they are set ... More »
The Sacrifice
$35.00 (Paperback book / Arena )
As the world spins out of control into World War II, Robert and his family wrestle with the challenges it presents. Robert offers his apartment to German-Jewish refugees, Artie intends to join up as soon as the fighting ... More »
One Foot Wrong
$24.95 (Paperback book / Allen & Unwin )
A child is imprisoned in a house by her reclusive religious parents. Hester has never seen the outside world; her companions are Cat, Spoon, Door, Handle, Broom, and they all speak to her. Her imagination is informed by ... More »
Review
Walking To The Moon
$29.95 (Trade paperback / Text Publishing )
A woman wakes from a coma, its cause unknown.
She refuses to see her family; she does not say why.
Slowly, almost reluctantly, she becomes stronger.
Now she will walk.
Where?
Walking to the Moon, Kate Cole-Adams' enthral... More »
Review
The Forgotten Garden
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Allen & Unwin )
A foundling, an old book of dark fairy tales, a secret garden, an aristocratic family, a love denied, a mystery - The Forgotten Garden is a captivating, atmospheric and compulsively readable story of the past, secrets, f... More »
Sea Of Many Returns
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Text Publishing )
In Sea of Many Returns, master storyteller Arnold Zable delivers a cavalcade of stories, characters and places. He takes us to the island of Ithaca, the Ionian Sea, Kalgoorlie and Melbourne, as well as Port Said, the Bla... More »
Review
The New Angel
$27.95 (Paperback book / )
The New Angel is the moving story of Bahram and Fereshteh (Persian for 'angel') growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran- Iraq war. At its centre this is a love story between two adolescents at odds ... More »
Review
The Nearly Happy Family
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Viking )
Fifteen-year-old Claire and her mother Jackie, a comedian are reeling in the aftermath of Claire’s father’s death – and they’re driving each other crazy. Claire is outraged when her mother decides to marry a much younger... More »
Hamlet: A Novel
$29.95 (Hardcover book / Text Publishing )
Hamlet’s father has just died. By the time they’ve filled in the grave his mother has remarried. Hamlet suspects foul play, and it’s troubling his spirit. Or maybe he was always troubled. Ophelia is in love with him. His... More »
Review
If You Were Mine
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Vintage )
How she had loved him, her little pink sugar mouse, her flawless boy. She had counted his fingers and toes, had held him up to kiss the down of fluff at the base of his spine. There had never been a baby like him in the ... More »
Review
Ghostlines
$29.95 (Trade paperback / Scribe Publications )
Winner of the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript
Ghostlines centres on Philip Trudeau, a once-respected investigative journalist who has stepped on the wrong toes. With his personal l... More »
Review
Stray Dog Winter
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Allen & Unwin )
A searing story of a young man's search for his own family truths set against the relentlessly cold, cruel and stark realities of early 80s Soviet Russia.
Enthralling, atmospheric and suspenseful, Stray Dog Winter is at ... More »
Review
The Babymoon
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Michael Joseph )
She's back. And this time, she's not alone. . .
Now living in Melbourne, Isabelle and Dr Jack are expecting their first child. And, naturally, Isabelle is the very model of a calm Earth Mother-to-be. . .
Or she would be ... More »
Review
Musk And Byrne
$24.95 (Paperback book / Allen & Unwin )
Jemma Musk is settling into her new home in the bustling goldfields town of Wombat Hill, wanting to establish herself as a painter and an independent woman. But word has gone out that she saw a young girl brush with deat... More »
Review
Steele Diaries
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Vintage )
'It's as if I am slowly sinking in the water, just occasionally making it back to the top for a gulp of air - to a sort of memory of what life can be - what life SHOULD be - and then down down down I go again. And each t... More »
His Illegal Self
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Vintage )
His Illegal Self is the story of Che. Raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, he is the precocious son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties. Yearning for his famous Outlaw parents... More »
People of the Book
$33.00$32.99 (Trade paperback / Harper Collins )
When Hanna Heath gets a call in the middle of the night in her Sydney home about a precious medieval manuscript which has been recovered from the smouldering ruins of war–torn Sarajevo, she knows she is on the brink of t... More »
Review
Eating Lolly
$28.00 (Paperback book / Fourth Estate )
Eighteen–year–old Mumma is pregnant and abandoned on a remote island by her respectable family. Her only company is a neighbour, a youth she calls Mister who brings offerings of fresh fish, and her only consolation is fe... More »
Review
Every Move You Make
$24.95 (Paperback book / Vintage )
Bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse, a builder-architect and his legacy - here are their stories, whole lives brought vividly ... More »
Posing In Vast Spaces
$28.95 (Paperback book / Black Pepper )
As much a travelling salon as a road novel, Posing in Vast Spaces is an object lesson in the art of digression. Our narrator, a poet, is an aesthete. He is given to frivolity, drinking, ogling, cloudwatching, research in... More »
The Household Guide To Dying
$32.95$29.95 (Trade paperback / Picador )
On the face of it, Delia's got it all - good marriage, two great kids, dream job writing witty, practical house and garden books. But when she's diagnosed with terminal cancer, she's forced to view her life in an entirel... More »
Review
Life In Seven Mistakes
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Bantam Press )
You're pathetic,' her brother said. 'Still bleating about what mummy and daddy did to you when you're almost old enough to retire. Are you still going to be blaming your parents when you're seventy? Life's too short, Liz... More »
Review
Dissection
$27.95 (Trade paperback / Scribe Publications )
Shortlisted for the 2007 Victorian Premier's Prize for an unpublished manuscript.
Doctor Anna McBride’s life is starting to unravel. The mother of two boys and a dedicated GP, she is being sued for medical negligence — a... More »
Review
Her Father's Daughter
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Univ Queensland Pr )
From the award-winning author John Clanchy comes a collection of five new tales that explore the fascinating - and often fraught - relations between fathers and daughters.
IT IS A WISE FATHER, the adage tells us, that kn... More »
Review
A Guide To The Birds Of East Africa
$29.95 (Trade paperback / Viking )
Reserved, honourable Mr Malik. You wouldn't notice him in a Nairobi street - except, perhaps, to comment on his carefully sculpted comb over - but beneath his unprepossessing exterior lies a warm heart and a secret passi... More »
Review
I Dream Of Magda
$23.95 (Paperback book / Allen & Unwin )
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in
its own way.'
Tolstoy wasn't thinking specifically of George and Matthew Harrison
when he wrote those words, but maybe he should have been. George
Harriso... More »
Fugitive Blue
$29.95 (Trade paperback / Allen & Unwin )
Usually you can tell when something has fallen apart. You can see it deteriorating into awkward little pieces and you know, no matter what, it's a broken thing. But occasionally, it's not so obvious. Occasionally you fin... More »
Avoiding Mr Right
$23.95 (Paperback book / Bantam Press )
So it's final then, you're not taking James to Melbourne?' Liza asked. 'Are you kidding? Taking a man to Melbourne would be like taking a sandwich to a smorgasbord.' Peta Tully has found her Mr Right . the only trouble i... More »
Tender Morsels
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Allen & Unwin )
Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. It is a tale of journeys and transformations, penetrating the boundaries between male and female, reality and myth, con... More »
Review
Taking Off
$23.95 (Paperback book / Arena )
Ash Lynch has worked (if you can call it that) in the magazine industry for what feels like forever. But he's at a very loose end - his ambition to climb the greasy pole of career success long since expired, his personal... More »
Review
God For The Killing
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Abc Books )
Judith, a daring and beautiful woman, hardened by her life as a slave and angered by the treatment of her people, the inhabitants of Nazareth, becomes a feared and powerful figure beginning with the brutal assassination ... More »
The Independence Of Miss Mary Bennet
$49.99 (Hardcover book / Harper Collins )
Lovers of Pride and Prejudice take note – Colleen McCullough has turned her attention from the travails of ancient Rome to the ongoing adventures of the Bennett sisters. There is a whole genre of fan-lit spinning off fro... More »
Without Warning
$32.99 (Trade paperback / Macmillan )
2003: In Paris, an assassin wakes from a coma. In Kuwait, American forces are assembled for their invasion of Iraq. In the pristine forest of the Cascades, a lone hiker watches a plane fly into the side of a mountain. An... More »
Review
The Lieutenant
$45.00$39.95 (Hardcover book / Text Publishing )
In 1787 Lieutenant Thomas Rooke sets sail from Portsmouth with the First Fleet and its cargo of convicts, destined for New South Wales. As a young officer and a man of science, the shy and quiet Rooke is full of anticipa... More »
Review
Stepping: Out A Novel
$27.99 (Paperback book / Giramondo Publishing )
This new novel by French-Australian writer Catherine Rey, begins in provincial France in the 1970s. Dressed in borrowed platform shoes and a cape, the seventeen-year-old Catherine is rejecting family and schooling to mov... More »
Review
The Penguin Book Of The Road
$35.00 (Trade paperback / Viking )
Australia is a nation of drivers. We spend more time behind the wheel than almost anyone else, on fast highways, lonely bush tracks, jammed city lanes and suburban streets. The road is the place where the great dramas of... More »
Oink, Oink, Oink: A Savage Modern Fable
$29.95 (Paperback book / Hunter )
A young boy grows up in rural Japan, raised by his mother among the clamour of industrial machines at the local fish cannery. He has never met his father, an Australian genetic scientist —he pieces together his sense of ... More »
Review
Herding Kites: A Celebration Of Australian Writing
$27.95 (Paperback book / Affirm )
Marking 10 years of the National Young Writers’ Festival (NYWF), Herding Kites is a new anthology celebrating the breadth, originality and dynamism of Australian writing.
Bringing a semblance of order to a decade of cr... More »
Review
To Love Honour And Betray: Till Divorce Us Do Part
$29.95 (Trade paperback / Bantam Press )
When Lucy's husband of eighteen years runs out on her, she'll do anything to win him back. Including climbing out of her bedroom window at one in the morning wearing her daughter's mini skirt. Jasper has left Lucy for he... More »
How To Break Your Own Heart
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Michael Joseph )
Amelia Bradlow seems to have everything she needs to be happy - a handsome husband, a beautiful home, money, good looks and a glamour job. Everything, that is, except the thing she wants most - a baby.
Ed, her husband, i... More »
Landscape Of Farewell
$23.95 (Paperback book / Allen & Unwin )
A hauntingly beautiful meditation on the land, the past, exile
and friendship, Landscape of Farewell is the powerful new
novel from acclaimed Australian author, Alex Miller.
It is the story of Max Otto, an elderly Germa... More »
The Complete Stories
$25.00 (Paperback book / Vintage )
David Malouf's imagination inhabits shocking violence, quick humor, appealing warmth and harsh cruelty with equal intensity. He shares tales of bookish boys, taciturn men and intimate stories of men and women looking for... More »
Review
The Landscape Of Desire
$29.95 (Trade paperback / Scribe Publications )
Several months have passed since the legendary explorers Burke and Wills disappeared into the desert and their whereabouts remain a mystery. Now, a search party has assembled to rescue them. Meanwhile, two other men are ... More »
Review