Great Australian Reads
A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists
$29.95 – Paperback / Transit Lounge Publishing
A meditation on happiness - where and in what place and with who we can find our centre, a perceptive vision of where our world is headed, and a testament to the power of memory and imagination, this is the best of novels: both... Buy or find out more→
Just Between Us: Australian Writers Tell the Truth About Female Friendship
$27.95 – Paperback / Pan Macmillan Australia
Empathetic, supportive and respectful... Or competitive, manipulative and downright bitchy? Or somewhere in between? Buy or find out more→
The Asylum
$32.95 – Paperback / Random House Australia
A gothic suspense novel that will keep you in its grip until the final page. Georgina Ferrars, a young woman living quietly with her uncle in London, wakes to find herself in a private asylum 200 miles away on Bodmin Moor in... Buy or find out more→
Now Showing
$29.99 – Paperback / Fremantle Press
Brimming with cinematic references, Now Showing is best consumed with a tub of hot popcorn. For the price of two movie tickets, screenwriter Ron Elliott's criminally good mini novels bring cinema's best known... Buy or find out more→
Who We Were
$29.99 – Paperback / Text Publishing Co
Melbourne, 1938. Annabel's dream is to be a scientist. Falling in love is not part of her plan. But when she meets Bill Whitten she knows instantly that they are destined for each other. She has to wait for him to come back from... Buy or find out more→
Just-a-girl
$24.99 – Paperback / UWA Publishing
Layla is only 14. As she sits in bed with a laptop, her mother Margot sleeps in the next room. But what separates them is more than just a wall. just_a_girl tears into the fabric of contemporary... Buy or find out more→
Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport
$29.99 – Paperback / Black Inc.
In the tradition of Helen Garner's The First Stone comes another closely observed, controversial book about sex, consent and power. At the centre of it is Anna Krien's account of the rape trial of a footballer. Both a... Buy or find out more→
Steeplechase
$29.99 – Paperback / Text Publishing Co
I force myself to take the phone away from my ear and search for the last incoming call. I store the number under one word, 'sister'. I know I should have used her name but it is all I can think of in this moment. Sister. My... Buy or find out more→
Political Animal
$19.99 – Paperback / Black Inc.
The essential work on Tony Abbott is now an expanded, updated short book - and a crucial election-year companion. Buy or find out more→
The Secret Lives of Men
$27.95 – Paperback / Scribe Publications
In these haunting stories, Georgia Blain explores human nature in all its richness: our motivations, our desires and our shortcomings. The men in these tales frequently linger at the edges - their longings & failures exerting a... Buy or find out more→
Welcome to Your New Life
$29.99 – Paperback / Black Inc.
When Anna Goldsworthy, pianist and perfectionist, falls pregnant with her first child, her excitement is tempered by the daunting journey ahead. In Welcome to Your New Life, she shares the dizzying wonder and crippling... Buy or find out more→
The Rosie Project
$24.95 – Paperback / Text Publishing Co
A first-date dud, socially awkward, and overly fond of quick-dry clothes, Don Tillman has given up on love. Until a chance encounter gives him an idea. Buy or find out more→
Burial Rites
$33.00 – Paperback / Pan Macmillan Australia
Based on a true story, Burial Rites is an astonishing and moving novel about the truths we claim to know and the ways in which we interpret what we're told. In beautiful, cut-glass prose, Hannah Kent portrays Iceland's... Buy or find out more→
My Beautiful Enemy
$29.99 – Paperback / Text Publishing Co
Arthur Wheeler is haunted by his infatuation with a Japanese youth he encountered in the enemy alien camp where he worked as a guard during WW2. Abandoning his wife and baby son, Arthur sets out on a doomed mission to rescue his... Buy or find out more→
Ghost Wife: A Memoir of Love and Defiance
$24.99 – Paperback / Black Inc.
Michelle Dicinoski has found the love of her life -- and now she just wants to get married and live happily ever after. The only problem is, she's in love with an American woman, Heather, and neither Australia nor America... Buy or find out more→
Entitlement
$29.99 – Paperback / Penguin Books Australia
Ten years after the mysterious disappearance of her much-loved brother Eliot, Cate McConville finally returns to her family farm -- only to discover that her ageing parents want to sell up and sever her only remaining link to... Buy or find out more→
The Best Australian Essays 2012
$29.99 – Paperback / Black Inc.
The new edition of this popular series. Available as a Standing order. Buy or find out more→
The Best Australian Stories 2012
$29.99 – Paperback / Black Inc.
In The Best Australian Stories 2012, Sonya Hartnett compiles the year's most compelling short fiction from Australian authors. Buy or find out more→
The Best Australian Poems 2012
$24.99 – Paperback / Black Inc.
The new edition of this popular annual. Available as a standing order Buy or find out more→
Whisky Charlie Foxtrot: A Novel
$24.99 – Paperback / Fremantle Press
Whisky and Charlie are identical twins. But everything about them is poles apart. It's got so bad that Charlie can't even bear to talk to his brother anymore -- until a freak accident steals Whisky from his family, and Charlie has... Buy or find out more→
The Best 100 Poems of Les Murray
$24.99 – Hardback / Black Inc.
A collection of poems from Australia's leading poet. Buy or find out more→
The Man Who Invented Vegemite
$29.99 – Paperback / Murdoch Books
Vegemite is perhaps Australias most enduring cultural icon, but how did this pungent, salty black paste, which for a lot of us is how we start the day, come to be created? Cyril Callister was a passionate scientist and... Buy or find out more→
The Amber Amulet
$16.99 – Hardback / Allen & Unwin
Meet Liam McKenzie, a lonely twelve year old boy whose alter ego is the Masked Avenger - a superhero with powers so potent, so fast, not even he can fully comprehend their extent. Along with his sidekick, Richie the power-beagle,... Buy or find out more→
The Lost Diggers
$70.00 – Hardback / HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
During the First World War, thousands of Aussie diggers and other Allied troops passed through the French town of Vignacourt, two hours north of Paris. Many had their photographs taken by Louis and Antoinette Thuillier as... Buy or find out more→
Annual Fiction Edition: The Novella Project
$27.99 – Paperback / Text Publishing Co
The annual Griffith REVIEW fiction edition is devoted to novellas. Shorter than a novel, longer than a story, the novella is the perfect length to read on the page or as an e-book. The Novella Project is a competition,... Buy or find out more→
The Burning Library
$32.99 – Paperback / Text Publishing Co
The Burning Library explores the lives and work of Australian novelists, many of whom have sadly disappeared from the public imagination. Among the writers Williamson discusses are Dymphna Cusack, Elizabeth Harrower, David... Buy or find out more→
The Words That Made Australia: How a Nation Came to Know Itself
$29.99 – Paperback / Black Inc.
This is not a book of documents, snippets or worthy speeches. Instead it presents the original essays and the moments of insight that told us what Australia is and could be. These are the essential statements -- from historians,... Buy or find out more→
Tales from the Political Trenches
$29.99 – Paperback / Melbourne University Press
At the 2007 federal election former journalist Maxine McKew won a spectacular victory against John Howard and wrote herself into Australian political history as only the second candidate to have ever defeated a sitting prime... Buy or find out more→
The Convent
$22.99 – Paperback / Allen & Unwin
In the early 1900s, Sadie is forced to relinquish her young daughter. This single act has consequences that ripples through the generations. Her daughter, Edna, is raised in a Melbourne convent, by an enclosed order of nuns. In a... Buy or find out more→
Street to Street
$24.00 – Paperback / Giramondo Publishing Co
Street to Street is one of Brian Castro’s best books yet, a comic-tragic enactment of the anxieties of the writing life, in which the early twentieth-century Sydney poet Christopher Brennan plays a major role. A... Buy or find out more→
Crimwife: An Insider's Account of Love Behind Bars
$29.99 – Paperback / Black Inc.
tba Buy or find out more→
Good on Paper
$24.95 – Paperback / Hunter Publishers
Somewhere out there, among the wounded egos and frustrated ambitions, among the mangled manuscripts, murky motives and missed deadlines - the great Australian novel is waiting to be discovered. When the infamous Josh Henry... Buy or find out more→
Nine Days
$29.99 – Paperback / Text Publishing Co
It is 1939 and although Australia is about to go to war, it doesn't quite realise yet that the situation is serious. Deep in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Richmond it is business - your own and everyone else's - as usual.... Buy or find out more→
Don't Go Back to Where You Came from: Why Multiculturalism Works
$29.99 – Paperback / UNSW Press
Tim Soutphommasane boldly stakes a claim for the overwhelming success of multiculturalism in Australia. European governments are declaring multiculturalism a failure, with many conservatives in Australia hastening to... Buy or find out more→
Midnight Empire
$27.99 – Paperback / Allen & Unwin
A tight, tense, heartstopping novel of modern warfare, where the stakes are high and the price is life in the tradition of le Carre's Absolute Friends Buy or find out more→
Gough Whitlam: His Time
$39.95 – Hardback / Melbourne University Press
Recreates the excitement of Whitlam's historic win in 1972, forces that never accepted his ascendency &the tragedy that followed. Drawing on previously unseen archival material, interviews with family, colleague sand with the man... Buy or find out more→
The Burial
$27.99 – Paperback / Allen & Unwin
A breathtakingly brilliant debut novel in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy - inspired by Australia's last bushranger, young woman Jessie Hickman. Buy or find out more→
Las Vegas For Vegans
$29.95 – Paperback
A. S. Patric's characters are searching for possibilities, truth and lies, the revelations of shadows, and the strange light that shines between tall buildings. Las Vegas for Vegans is original, assured, beautiful storytelling of... Buy or find out more→
Get Well Soon!: My (Un)Brilliant Career as a Nurse
$24.95 – Paperback / University of Queensland Press
My quest for a career started early, when I was four years old and gave myself a haircut to see if I liked that sort of thing. I liked it plenty, but my mother did not. Buy or find out more→
Speechless: A Year in My Father's Business
$32.99 – Paperback / Melbourne University Press
James Button spent a year writing speeches for Kevin Rudd. Before that, he reported on politics as a highly regarded journalist for Fairfax. But James also has politics in the blood: his father was the diminutive but... Buy or find out more→
The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer
$29.95 – Paperback / University of Queensland Press
A murder mystery and comedy of manners that is never what it seems Buy or find out more→
Elyne Mitchell: A Daughter Remembers
$32.99 – Paperback / HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
In 1958, Elyne Mitchell's The Silver Brumby was published to acclaim and quickly became a much - loved classic of Australian children's literature. Now, for the centenary of Elyne's birth, her daughter Honor Auchinleck tells the... Buy or find out more→
Fishing for Tigers
$29.99 – Paperback / Pan Macmillan Australia
Six years ago, Mischa Reese left her abusive husband and suffocating life in California and reinvented herself in steamy, chaotic Hanoi. In Vietnam, she finds satisfying work and enjoys a life of relative luxury and personal... Buy or find out more→
Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East
$29.99 – Paperback / Black Inc.
Benjamin Law considers himself pretty lucky to live in Australia: he can hold his boyfriend's hand in public and lobby his politicians to recognise same-sex marriage. But as the child of migrants, he's also curious about how... Buy or find out more→
Hannah And Emil
$29.99 – Paperback / Allen & Unwin
Compelling, heart-breaking and life-affirming, this is a story of great love and courage in desperate times. Emil and Hannah live their lives amid the turmoil of 20th-century history. Emil, a German veteran of the Great War, has... Buy or find out more→
Batavia
$34.95 – Paperback / Random House Australia
The greatest story in Australia’s history. The Shipwreck of the Batavia combines in just the one tale the birth of the world's first corporation, the brutality of colonisation, the battle of good vs evil, the derring-do... Buy or find out more→
Midnight Promise: A Detective's Story in Ten Cases
$29.99 – Paperback / Text Publishing Co
Read our Q&A with Zane Lovitt about The Midnight Promise here. John Dorn is a private... Buy or find out more→
In the Company of Strangers
$32.99 – Paperback / Pan Macmillan Australia
Ruby and Cat's friendship was forged on an English dockside over sixty years ago when, both fearful, they boarded a ship bound for Australia. It was a friendship that was supposed to last a lifetime but when news of Cat's death... Buy or find out more→
Autumn Laing
$27.99 – Paperback / Allen & Unwin
Autumn Laing has long outlived the legendary circle of artists she cultivated in the 1930s. Now 'old and skeleton gaunt', she reflects on her tumultuous relationship with the abundantly talented Pat Donlon and the effect it had on... Buy or find out more→
Toyo: A Memoir
$29.99 – Paperback / Black Inc.
Toyo learned to ask nothing, to wait and count the days. But they passed and passed and still the doorway remained empty of his deep voice, calling out her name. Toyo is the story of a remarkable woman, a vivid picture of Japan... Buy or find out more→
Eat My Words: A Memoir of Politics, Pig-outs and Pickles
$24.99 – Paperback / ABC Books
Mungo MacCallum started eating at an early age and just got back from lunch. In the meantime he has become one of Australia′s wittiest and most incisive political journalists, written for everyone from the Australian... Buy or find out more→
The Engagement
$29.99 – Paperback / Penguin Books Australia
Liese Campbell has an engagement for the weekend: to stay with Alexander Colquhoun at his country seat in remote Australia. Liese is English. She's been working at her uncle's estate agency in Melbourne to pay off her debts.... Buy or find out more→
Black Mountain
$29.95 – Paperback / University of Queensland Press
This book travels from the sulphur mines of early 20th century Sicily to the clubs of post war Paris Buy or find out more→
Mine-field: The Dark Side of Australia's Resource Rush
$29.95 – Paperback / Black Inc.
In Mine-Field, Paul Cleary counts the true human and economic costs of Australia's short-term mineral addiction. Buy or find out more→
Darkest Little Room
$29.95 – Paperback
The darkest little room in the world is the human heart, she said at last. Even yours, perhaps, has black secrets that you would never let into the light. Patricks Hollands haunting new novel arises from his experiences in... Buy or find out more→
Blueprints for a Barbed-wire Canoe
$19.99 – Paperback / Text Publishing Co
Bram and his fellow residents are drawn by a dream: the promise of a freeway leading to a new suburb north of the city. The houses are built, but the freeway never comes. One by one, the dreamers leave, until only a small,... Buy or find out more→
The Marmalade Files
$29.99 – Paperback / HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
An imaginative romp through the dark underbelly of politics by two veteran Canberra insiders.When seasoned newshound Harry Dunkley is slipped a compromising photograph one frosty Canberra dawn he knows he's onto something... Buy or find out more→
Happy Valley
$29.99 – Hardback / Text Publishing Co
Originally published in 1939, Happy Valley is set in a small country town in the Snowy Mountains. Based on Patrick White's own experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro, near Adaminaby in south-eastern New South... Buy or find out more→
Caravan Story
$19.99 – Paperback / Text Publishing Co
Examining the darker side of our manufacture and manipulation of culture, Caravan Story is a deeply unsettling and, at times, a hilarious read. With Macauley's inexorable narrative logic, we are held in its thrall until the... Buy or find out more→
The Hum of Concrete
$24.95 – Paperback / MidnightSun Publishing Pty
The Hum of Concrete is an evocative novel about a city and its people. Set in the multicultural city of Malmö, Sweden, The Hum of Concrete is the story of five people whose lives intersect. Consumed with... Buy or find out more→
Watching the Climbers on the Mountain
$23.99 – Paperback / Allen & Unwin
A novel of passion and brooding suspense, Watching the Climbers on the Mountain is set in the remote Central Highlands of Queensland. Buy or find out more→
The Yalda Crossing
$32.95 – Paperback / University of Queensland Press
The Yalda Crossing takes this little-known episode in Australia's first-contact history and creates from it a gripping adventure about the desparate battle for land and its dreadful consequences, which live on to this day. Buy or find out more→
Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott
$19.95 – Paperback / Black Inc.
Quarterly Essay is a trailblazing Australian journal of politics and culture. Each issue contains a single essay written at a length of about 25,000 words, followed by correspondence on previous essays. Buy or find out more→
Tarcutta Wake
$19.95 – Paperback / University of Queensland Press
This collection announces the arrival of an exciting new talent in Australian fiction In short vignettes and longer stories, Rowe explores the idea of things that are left behind: souvenirs and scars, or memories, values and... Buy or find out more→
There Should Be More Dancing
$19.95 – Paperback / Random House Australia
From the author of the bestselling novel The Dressmaker. Margery Blandon has led a life of principles. Now she finds herself sitting on the 43rd floor of the Tropic Hotel, preparing to throw herself to her death. She was always... Buy or find out more→
Blood
$29.95 – Paperback / University of Queensland Press
From the much-loved author of Shadowboxing comes a stunning debut novel in the tradition of Honey Brown, Chris Wommersley, and Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright . If there's one thing Jesse knows when he sees it, it's trouble. Buy or find out more→
After
$19.99 – Paperback / Penguin Books Australia
Following a heartbreaking struggle to survive as a Jewish child in Germany, Felix faces perhaps his greatest challenge - to find hope when he's lost almost everything. As Europe goes through the final agonizing stages of the war,... Buy or find out more→
Floundering
$27.95 – Paperback / Text Publishing Co
Tom and Jordy have been living with their gran since the day their mother, Loretta, left them on her doorstep and disappeared. Now Loretta's returned, and she wants her boys back. Tom and Jordy hit the road with Loretta in her... Buy or find out more→
The Meaning of Grace
$27.95 – Paperback / Random House Australia
'Mum is the reference point. If you ever get confused about anything, there she is, waiting with all her knowledge of you.' Grace Fisher, mother of three, one day decides her husband is a sore disappointment and moves the... Buy or find out more→
Pilgrimage
$29.95 – Paperback / Scribe Publications
At forty-nine, Celeste has left behind the religion of her childhood, but her mother, Patricia, remains a devout Catholic. When Patricia is diagnosed with a terminal illness, Celeste reluctantly agrees to accompany her mother... Buy or find out more→
Darkness On The Edge Of Town
$24.99 – Paperback / HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
My dad, he collects broken things ... Where other people see junk he sees potential ... My dad collects broken people too ... Vincent is nearly forty years old, with little to show for his life except his precious... Buy or find out more→
Running Dogs
$29.95 – Paperback / Scribe Publications
Jakarta, 1997, and the city is on the verge of a revolution. Even the Jordan children - Petra, Isaak, Kristina, and Paul - can feel it coming, shaking the edges of their privileged, protected expat world. Buy or find out more→
The Architecture of Song
$28.00 – Paperback / HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
Small, but perfectly formed... Augustus is not a dwarf. He's perfectly proportioned, just on a smaller scale than other people. Abandoned by his mother at the circus, he is taken on by Rosa, a fiery and supremely pragmatic girl... Buy or find out more→
The Oldest Song in the World
$24.95 – Paperback / HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
Kate, a lonely city woman and reluctant student, is asked by her teachers to travel to the middle of the Australian desert to record a dying Aboriginal woman singing an ancient song. She accepts because she believes that she might... Buy or find out more→
The Daughters of Mars
$32.95 – Paperback / Random House Australia
In 1915 sisters Naomi and Sally Durance answer a call for nurses to join the war effort. They are escaping the family dairy farm in the Macleay Valley, and they carry a secret with them. Soon they are in Egypt, where they are put... Buy or find out more→
Mateship with Birds
$19.99 – Paperback / Pan Macmillan Australia
Winner of the 2013 Stella Prize. Read Carrie Tiffany's interview with Gregory Day... Buy or find out more→
A Premier's State
$34.99 – Paperback / Melbourne University Press
In May 1994, while I was going through pre - selection for the seat of Williamstown, I sat down at my desk at home and I wrote a note. I was thirty - nine years old and in that note I mapped out what I hoped would happen in my... Buy or find out more→
The Cartographer
$29.99 – Paperback / HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
Set in Melbourne in the 1950s, a 11-year-old boy witnesses a murder when he is spying through a window of a strange house. Buy or find out more→
Fault Lines
$22.99 – Paperback / Spineless Wonders
The short stories of Pierz Newton-John move through the full range of masculine experience, with an openness, not afraid to show men at their most lonely, sexual, loving, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes abusive. Tender moments... Buy or find out more→
Memory Of Salt
$27.95 – Paperback
Alis father is a Turkish circus musician performing in Kabul when Alis mother, a young pediatrician from Melbourne, meets him in a bar. He plays the trumpet, the saz, the flute, hears voices that urge him to violence, sees angels... Buy or find out more→
The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners
$32.99 – Paperback / ABC Books
In the fifty years it′s been on air, Four Corners has broken more stories, triggered more headlines, generated more controversy and aired more high quality investigative journalist than any other program in Australia. In... Buy or find out more→
My Hundred Lovers
$27.99 – Paperback / Allen & Unwin
Lyrical and exquisite, My Hundred Lovers captures the sheer wonder of life, desire and love. A woman, on the eve of her fiftieth birthday, reflects on her days with one hundred scenes from a life adding up to a simple human... Buy or find out more→
The Mountain
$22.99 – Paperback / Random House Australia
An Oxford ethnologist, Leonard, travels to Papua in 1968 with his young Dutch wife, Rika, to take up a post at the university, and to further his research by filming the local Papuans in a remote village. Conservative and... Buy or find out more→
The Rest is Weight
$19.95 – Paperback / University of Queensland Press
The award-winning stories in The Rest is Weight reflect Mills' years in Central Australia, as well as her travels to Mexico, Russia and China. The collection displays a confident diversity of narrative voices and a brevity in... Buy or find out more→
Love and Hunger: Thoughts on the Gift of Food
$24.95 – Paperback / Allen & Unwin
'What's important is the fact of eating together - the gathering at the table, the conviviality.' Love & Hunger is a distillation of everything Charlotte Wood has learned over more than twenty years about cooking and the pleasures... Buy or find out more→
Blackwattle Creek
$29.95 – Paperback / Penguin Books Australia
From the winner of the 2011 Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Novel comes a cracking new Charlie Berlin mystery. It's September 1957, two days before the VFL grand final, and Detective Sergeant Charlie Berlin, former bomber... Buy or find out more→
Tony Speaks!: The Wisdom of the Abbott...
$9.99 – Paperback / Black Inc.
You've seen him wearing speedos, kissing babies, driving a mining truck and chatting to his flock. But who is the real Tony Abbott? As the Bible says, by his words you shall know him. Buy or find out more→
Eleven Seasons
$29.99 – Paperback / Allen & Unwin
The Australian /Vogel's Literary Award winner 2012 Buy or find out more→
Left Turn: Political Essays for the New Left
$32.99 – Paperback / Melbourne University Press
Left Turn shows why the Left should be taken seriously. It is neither a policy document for a political party or a comprehensive list of ways to improve Australia. The essays are passionate, relevant, radical, controversial and... Buy or find out more→
Sweet Old World
$32.95 – Paperback / Random House Australia
Read Deborah Robertson's interview with Sian Prior about Sweet Old World. 'He goes down the... Buy or find out more→
Welcome to Normal
$29.95 – Paperback / Random House Australia
This collection of stories showcase the calibre and versatility of Nick Earls at his perceptive best. An Australian wine - maker tries to crack the Taiwanese market. Two holiday - makers in Spain decide to tell a lie about each... Buy or find out more→
No Sex in the City
$28.00 – Paperback / Pan Macmillan Australia
Twenty-eight-year old Esma has a Masters in human resources management, her own investment property, is well-travelled, has excellent taste in music, watches the ABC news, has The Guardian saved as an application on her iPhone,... Buy or find out more→
The Australian Moment: How We Were Made for These Times
$32.95 – Paperback / Penguin Books Australia
There's no better place to be during economic turbulence than Australia. Brilliant in a bust, we've learnt to use our brains in a boom. Although the Great Recession continues to rumble around the globe, we successfully... Buy or find out more→
The Italian Girl
$29.95 – Paperback / University of Queensland Press
A true story of love, loss and mothers and daughters across generations. In 2001 Rebecca Huntley's maternal grandmother; her Italian nonna &; died. Buy or find out more→