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VCE Literature 2009

Hunting the Wild Pineapple
Thea Astley

$24.95 – Paperback book / Penguin

Leverson, the narrator at the centre of these stories, calls himself a 'people freak.' Seduced by north Queensland's sultry beauty and unique strangeness, he is as fascinated by the invading hordes of misfits from the so... Buy or find out more 


Emma
Jane Austen

$9.95 – Paperback book / Penguin

Beautiful, clever, rich – and single Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. B... Buy or find out more 



Selected Poems
Charles Baudelaire

$9.95 – Paperback book / Classics

The poems of Charles Baudelaire, collected as Les Fleurs du Mal, are filled with unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity subjects dismissed as unpoetic by French literary conventions of the time. 'Tableaux parisiens... Buy or find out more 


Wolf Notes Second Edition
Judith Beveridge

$22.00 – Paperback book / Giramondo Publishing

Beveridge's poetry is remarkable for its attentiveness to the humble rituals of life. It discovers richness and grace in the smallest, the poorest, the most awkward of the most transient of beings. Buy or find out more 



The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Anne Bronte

$9.95 – Paperback book / Penguin

Gilbert Markham is deeply intrigued by Helen Graham, a beautiful and secretive young woman who has moved into nearby Wildfell Hall with her young son. He is quick to offer Helen his friendship, but when her reclusive beh... Buy or find out more 


Good Earth
Pearl Buck

$19.95 – Paperback book / Simon & Schuster

Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer Prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing b... Buy or find out more 



Sugar and Other Stories
A.S. Byatt

$0.00 – Paperback book / Vintage

The constant theme running through this collection of short stories, the first collection by A.S. Byatt, is that of repetition, taking the form of family patterns recurring across generations, the return of the past in t... Buy or find out more 



Mao's Last Dancer
Li Cunxin

$32.95 – Paperback book / Viking

In a small, desperately poor village in north-east China, a young peasant boy sits at his rickety old school desk, interested more in the birds outside than in Chairman Mao's Red Book and the grand words it contains. But... Buy or find out more 


The Patron Saint Of Eels
Gregory Day

$22.95 – Paperback book / Picador

I loved this book so much I read it twice. Set in the Victorian coastal town of Mangowak the protaganist Noel Lea awakes to find the ditches that line the road outside his barn full to brimming with squirming black eels.... Buy or find out more 



Bleak House
Charles Dickens

$9.95 – Paperback book / Penguin

As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal... Buy or find out more 


Penguin Book of the Beach
Robert Drewe (ed.)

$29.95 – Paperback book / Penguin Books

The average Australian has conducted a lifelong love affair with the beach and the ocean shores, bays, dunes, lagoons and rivers of the coast. Until now, however, no one has attempted to match the ancient sensual and art... Buy or find out more 



Silas Marner
George Eliot

$9.95 – Paperback book / Penguin

Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered weaver Silas Marner lives alone in Raveloe, living only for work and his precious hoard of money. But when his money is sto... Buy or find out more 


Selected Poems
T. S. Eliot

$27.95 – Paperback book / Faber

This selection, which was made by Eliot himself, is intended as an introduction to the main body of his poetry prior to Four Quartets, which is available separately in Faber Paperbacks. The selection includes the whole o... Buy or find out more 



Cloudstreet
Tim Winton, Nick Enright & Justin Monjo

$18.95 – Paperback book / Currency

A sprawling stage adaptation of Tim Winton’s award-winning novel. Cloudstreet follows the fluctuating fortunes of two families who inhabit a rambling old house in Perth. Buy or find out more 


Passage to India
E. M. Forster

$9.95 – Paperback book / Penguin Books

When Adela and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced British community. Determined to explore the 'real India', they seek the gu... Buy or find out more 



Copenhagen
Michael Frayn

$26.95 – Trade paperback / Methuen

In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a strange trip to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr. They were old friends and close colleagues, and they had revolutionised atomic physics in the 19... Buy or find out more 


Stasiland
Anna Funder

$24.95 – Paperback book / Text Publishing

Truth can be stranger - and more fascinating - than fiction. Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories from the underbelly of the most perfected surveillance state of all time, the former East Germany.

Funder meets Miriam,... Buy or find out more 



North and South
Elizabeth Gaskell

$9.95 – Paperback book / Penguin Books

When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the north of England. Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new... Buy or find out more 


Dont Take Your Love to Town
Ruby Langford Ginibi

$24.95 – Paperback book / Univ Queensland Pr

Ruby Langford Ginibi's bestselling first book is now back in print.

With sales of over 30,000 copies since publication in 1988, Don't Take Your Love to Town is now a seminal work of Indigenous memoir. It has been set for... Buy or find out more 



Idea of Perfection
Kate Grenville

$22.95 – Paperback book / Picador

Douglas Cheesman is 55 years old, and the kind of man you would definitely not look at twice. But he can tell you more than you'll ever want to know about bridges. Harley Savage, big and plain, is a thrice-married woman ... Buy or find out more 


Gwen Harwood: Collected Poems
Gwen Harwood

$34.95 – Paperback book / Univ Queensland Pr

This generous-sized collection contains all six published volumes, as well as most of Gwen Harwood's uncollected poems. It is the outcome of several years of collecting and research by editors who have specialised in Har... Buy or find out more 



A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway

$19.95 – Paperback book / Arrow

'If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.' Hemingway's memories of his life as an unknown writer liv... Buy or find out more 


Hedda Gabler & Other Plays
Henrik Ibsen

$9.95 – Paperback book / Penguin

In these three unforgettably intense plays, Henrik Ibsen explores the problems of personal and social morality that he perceived in the world around him and, in particular, the complex nature of truth. "The Pillars of th... Buy or find out more 



Washington Square
Henry James

$12.95 – Paperback book / Oxford University Pr

When timid and plain Catherine Sloper acquires a dashing and determined suitor, her father, convinced that the young man is nothing more than a fortune-hunter, decides to put a stop to their romance. Torn between her des... Buy or find out more 


My Brother Jack
George Johnston

$22.99 – Paperback book / Harper Perennial

David and Jack Meredith grow up in a patriotic suburban Melbourne household during the First World War‚ and go on to lead lives that could not be more different.Through the story of the two brothers‚ George Johnston crea... Buy or find out more 



Major Works
John Keats

$26.95 – Paperback book / Oxford University Pr

This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Keats's poetry and prose - all the majo... Buy or find out more 


Philip Larkin: Collected Poems
Philip Larkin

$29.95 – Paperback book / Faber

This new edition of Larkin's poems for the first time presents his four published books, The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows in their original sequence.

It also includes an appendix o... Buy or find out more 



Skinned by Light: Selected Poems
Anthony Lawrence

$24.95 – Paperback book / Univ Queensland Pr

Selected poems of award-winning poet and novelist Anthony Lawrence. Buy or find out more 


The Fox / The Captain's Doll / The Ladybird
D. H. Lawrence

$9.95 – Paperback book / Penguin

These three novellas display D. H. Lawrence's brilliant and insightful evocation of human relationships - both tender and cruel - and the devastating results of war. In The Fox, two young women living on a small farm dur... Buy or find out more 



Doctored Evidence
Donna Leon

$24.95 – Paperback book / Arrow

When the body of an wealthy elderly woman is found, brutally murdered in her Venetian flat, it is soon clear to the police that the prime suspect is her Rumanian maid, who has disappeared and is heading for Rumania. When... Buy or find out more 


Robert Lowell: Selected Poems
Robert Lowell

$12.95 – Paperback book / Faber

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own... Buy or find out more 



The White Earth
Andrew McGahan

$23.95 – Paperback book / Allen & Unwin

One spring day in late 1992, when William was halfway between his eighth birthday and his ninth, he looked out from the back verandah of his home and saw, huge in the sky, the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. He st... Buy or find out more 


Bypass: The Story Of A Road
Michael McGirr

$24.95 – Paperback book / Picador

""All the dirt on the Hume Highway"" (Shane Maloney)

The Hume Highway runs from Sydney to Melbourne. Like all the great roads of the world, it is longer than it is wide. Flabby, unfit and forty, Michael McGirr decided to... Buy or find out more 



The Collected Stories
Katherine Mansfield

$9.95 – Paperback book / Penguin

Katherine Mansfield's clear, sparkling and perceptive short stories revolutionized the genre, and this collection represents the whole range of her writing. Moving, resonant, full of light and colour, they range from sho... Buy or find out more 


Parisian Affair and Other Stories
Guy De Maupassant

$9.95 – Paperback book / Penguin

Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes and small-minded bourgeousie, and the isolated villages of rural Normandy that de Maupassant knew as a child, the thirty-three tales in this volume are among the most darkly... Buy or find out more 



Rose Notes
Andrea Mayes

$24.95 – Paperback book / Penguin Books

Charming, infuriating Dobie Kinnear, widower and manipulator extraordinaire, is battling to retain his wits, his authority, and his only daughter, Pearl.

Pearl, a hostage to her ageing father's needs, fiercely resents he... Buy or find out more 


Map of the Gardens
Gillian Mears

$21.00 – Paperback book / Picador

A gutsy new collection of short stories by a writer gifted in the language of emotions, these tales read like parables of loss and renewal, and reflect the rural landscape in all its various forms. Rich in images from ma... Buy or find out more 



Dance of the Happy Shades
Alice Munro

$24.95 – Paperback book / Vintage

Alice Munro's territory is the farms and semi-rural towns of south-western Ontario. Described by one of her peers as going around with a 'delicate, rueful smile and a wicked pen', she says of herself: 'I guess that maybe... Buy or find out more 


Selected Poems
Les Murray

$27.95 – Paperback book / Black Inc

This is the first port of call for anyone wanting to experience the poetry of Les Murray. Completely up to date, it contains Murray's finest work (excluding Fredy Neptune), selected by the poet himself. This beautifully ... Buy or find out more 



Honour
Joanna Murray-Smith

$21.95 – Paperback book / Univ Nsw Pr

What happens when everything you have used to define yourself—every quality, role and affiliation—suddenly abandon you? What happens when a mature, intelligent, responsible and loving woman finds her life disappearing?... Buy or find out more 


Radiance: Play and Screenplay
Louis Nowra

$21.95 – Paperback book / Currency

Three half-sisters who have drifted far apart meet again at the ramshackle house on stilts where they grew up. They have come to bury their mother. This volume includes the original play, the screenplay and an essay by L... Buy or find out more 



Dead Heart
Nick Parsons

$18.95 – Paperback book / Currency

In the isolated community of Wala Wala, Senior Constable Ray Lorkin struggles to keep an uneasy peace between Aboriginal tradition and the law he is sworn to uphold. But when a local man dies in mysterious circumstances,... Buy or find out more 


Hotel Sorrento
Hannie Rayson

$21.95 – Paperback book / Currency

Three sisters, reunited after ten years in different worlds, again feel the familiar constraints of family life. Hotel Sorrento looks at conflicting concepts of national identity and family loyalty. Buy or find out more 



Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys

$19.95 – Paperback book / Penguin

Jean Rhys's late, literary masterpiece, Wild Sargasso Sea, was inspired by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, ... Buy or find out more 


Hamlet: Cambridge School Shakespeare
William Shakespeare

$17.95 – Paperback book / Cambridge Univ Pres

Cambridge School Shakespeare considers Hamlet as theatre and its text as script, enabling students to inhabit the imaginative world of the play in an accessible, meaningful and creative way. It approaches the play in a n... Buy or find out more 



Much Ado About Nothing
William Shakespeare

$9.95 – Paperback book / Penguin

A vivacious woman and a high-spirited man both claim that they are determined never to marry. But when their friends trick them into believing that each harbours secret feelings for the other, they begin to question whet... Buy or find out more 


Frankenstein
Mary Shelley

$9.95 – Paperback book / Penguin

Obsessed with creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life with electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and deni... Buy or find out more 



Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Tom Stoppard

$24.95 – Paperback book / Faber

Two minor characters from Hamlet offer a novel view of the melancholy Dane. Buy or find out more 


Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut

$12.95 – Paperback book / Vintage

Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller – these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the world'... Buy or find out more 



The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
Oscar Wilde

$9.95 – Paperback book / Classics

Oscar Wilde's complex identity, as family man and homosexual outsider, socialite, socialist and Irish nationalist, underpins his unique insight into role-playing and the masks we all wear. A Woman of No Importance, for a... Buy or find out more 


The Surgeon of Crowthorne
Simon Winchester

$19.95 – Paperback book / Penguin

Simon Winchester's The Surgeon of Crowthorne was an international bestseller and tells an extraordinary true story of murder, madness and an extraordinary friendship in the nineteenth century. It is the tale of James Mur... Buy or find out more 



This Boy's Life
Tobias Wolff

$23.95 – Paperback book / Bloomsbury

At just ten years old, Tobias Wolff is reluctantly on the road. His restless, spirited mother is desperate to build a life for them both, but Tobias is struggling with this ever-changing routine. When they finally reach ... Buy or find out more 


Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf

$9.95 – Paperback book / Penguin Books

Virginia Woolf's blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of writers and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for financial independence and intellectual f... Buy or find out more 



Wordsworth: Selected Poems
William Wordsworth

$9.95 – Paperback book / Penguin

One of the most enduringly popular of Romantic poets, William Wordsworth epitomized the spirit of his age with his celebration of the natural world and belief in the importance of feeling. This volume brings together a r... Buy or find out more 


Sir Thomas Wyatt: Complete Poems
Thomas Wyatt

$0.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Books

As a diplomat in Renaissance Europe, and a luminary at the court of Henry VII, Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote in an incestuous world where everyone was uneasily subject to the royal whims and rages. Wyatt had himself survived tw... Buy or find out more 



Casablanca: Special Edition

$19.95 – Digital video disc / Warner Bros Home Vid

They had a date with fate in Casablanca!Arguably one of the greatest movies ever produced, Casablanca is a romantic masterpiece. Humphrey Bogart takes the leading role in this "love will conquer all" movie that regularly... Buy or find out more 


Grave of the Fireflies: Collector's Edition

$29.95 – Digital video disc / Madman

In the aftermath of a World War II bombing, two orphaned children struggle to survive in the Japanese countryside. To Seita and his four-year-old sister, the helplessness and indifference of their countrymen is even more... Buy or find out more 



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