Readings Recommends: Australian Fiction
Best Of The Best: Top Australian Stories from Six Years' Collections Editor
$24.95 (Paperback book / The Five Mile Press )
From the six story collections Barry Oakley has put together for The Five Mile Press, he's now picked the best - the best of the best! This rich final collection explores the full range of experience - from innocence to ... More »
Smoke In The Room
$29.99 (Trade paperback / Picador )
The searing new novel from the internationally-acclaimed author of Taming the Beast, The Gospel According to Luke and Princesses & Pornstars. More »
Review
Hollywood Ending
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Text Publishing )
Set in a glamorous and seedy Los Angeles, Hollywood Ending is a story that will make your heart skip a beat.
Pink-haired Hilda and endearing punk Benji are two seventeen year olds with an obsessive hobby — they haunt the... More »
Review
Wonders Of A Godless World
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Allen & Unwin )
The witch, the virgin, the archangel, the duke and an orphan meet in the extraordinary new novel from the award-winning Andrew McGahan - an electrifying, tumultuous story of inner demons, desire and devastation, a powerf... More »
Review
The Virtuoso
$27.99 (Paperback book / Harper Collins )
Looking back‚ I realise I′d always been waiting for the arrival of Noel Mewton−Wood. His entrance occurred with such ease that I began to believe he′d always been there‚ standing in the wings‚ long before I′d even laid e... More »
Review
The True Story Of Butterfish
$32.95$27.95 (Trade paperback / Vintage )
Curtis is no longer a rock star. His dad is dead, he has no wife and his life is a mess.
'I'm not about to attack,' she said. She smirked with one side of her mouth and looked up at me through the black spray of her frin... More »
Review
The Spare Room
$23.95 (Paperback book / Text Publishing )
Helen prepares her spare room for her friend Nicola, who is flying down from Sydney for a three-week visit. But this is no ordinary visit—Nicola has advanced cancer. She is coming to Melbourne to receive treatment she ... More »
Review
Things We Didn't See Coming
$24.95 (Paperback book / Sleepers Publishing )
It’s the anxious eve of the millennium. The car is packed to capacity, and as midnight approaches, a family flees the city in a fit of panic and paranoid, conflicting emotions.
The ensuing journey spans decades and off... More »
Review
Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature
$69.95$49.95 (Hardcover book / Allen & Unwin )
A landmark anthology of Australian literary writing across all genres from over two centuries, this is an authoritative collection more than six years in the making, providing a window onto Australian culture. An essenti... More »
Review
Dreams Of Speaking
$32.95$14.95 (Paperback book / Vintage )
In this, her third novel, Gail Jones shows herself to be a writer more and more comfortable with her medium. Alice Black is a young academic with a grant to write about the aesthetics of modernity. For most of her life s... More »
Readings and Writings: Forty Years in Books
$24.95 (Paperback book / )
Since opening in 1969, Readings has grown to become one of the most renowned and beloved bookshops in Melbourne and a landmark on the local literary scene. From the first small shop on Lygon Street to its current six loc... More »
Review
The Best Australian Stories 2009
$29.95 (Paperback book / Black Inc )
In The Best Australian Stories 2009, Delia Falconer collects the year's most outstanding short fiction, showcasing the strength and diversity of Australian writing today. There are masterful stories from some of th... 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
The Story Of Danny Dunn
$49.95 (Hardcover book / Viking )
In the aftermath of the Great Depression few opportunities existed for working-class boys, but at just eighteen Danny Dunn has a good deal going for him: brains, looks, sporting ability - and an easy charm. His parents r... More »
Barley Patch
$27.95 (Paperback book / Giramondo Publishing )
Barley Patch is Gerald Murnane’s first published book of fiction since 1995. It is a meditation on fiction and Murnane’s own dedication to writing, and an examination of the relation between memory, image and lived exper... More »
Review
Parrot and Olivier in America
$49.95$39.95 (Hardcover book / Hamish Hamilton )
Olivier is a young aristocrat, one of an endangered species born in France just after the Revolution. Parrot, the son of an itinerant English printer, wanted to be an artist but has ended up in middle age as a servant.
W... More »
Review
Father's Day
$24.95 (Paperback book / Hunter House Pub )
‘To make stories look and sound so heartbreakingly real you need an unflinching eye and a compassionate ear and Tony Birch knows just what details are going to go straight to his reader’s heart. Loss, memory, and the inv... More »
Review
The Essence Of The Thing
$29.95 (Trade paperback / Text Publishing )
Haunting and hilarious: a novel about the things women do to hold onto love, and about what men do to escape it.
Nicola should never have stepped out to buy that pack of cigarettes because the man she discovers in her li... More »
Review
The World Beneath
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Scribe Publications )
Once Rich and Sandy were environmental activists, part of a world-famous blockade in Tasmania to save the wilderness. Now, twenty-five years later, they have both settled into the uncomfortable compromises of middle-age ... More »
Review
The Australian Long Story
$39.95 (Paperback book / Hamish Hamilton )
In this collection, acclaimed writer Mandy Sayer brings together nine of the best Australian examples of the long story - tales that combine the intensity of the short story with the complexity of a novel.
In these stori... More »