Readings.com.au: Peter Goldsworthy

Gravel

Eight brilliant stories by a master of the form, author of the classic 'Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam' and 'The Kiss'

A contented woman finds herself considering a bizarre sexual invitation that just days before filled her with scorn. A mediocre man is pulled into a strange dance with his stalker. A father gives his daughter a Christmas present with a disturbing history. An ugly sports parent plays a game of ridiculous chance. A young boy's music lesson offers him a discordant insight into adult behaviour. And in a primal tale about the borderline between animals and humans, death is horrifyingly not the end of the story . . .

Compulsively readable, pitch-perfect in mood, Gravel ponders the forces that can wear down a marriage, darken desire, lead people to thwart their best intentions.

PRAISE FOR GOLDSWORTHY'S SHORT FICTION

'Stories of magnificent achievement and disturbing power' Gail Jones, Australian Book Review

'A subtle hook draws the reader in . . . Once the lure is taken, you're drawn effortlessly to the end' Barry Oakley, Weekend Australian

'Goldsworthy's brilliance is peculiarly Australian. His is a literature of the Australian mundane' Ben Eltham, Courier-Mail

Everything I Knew

Peter Goldsworthy's high-octane, fourteen-year-old narrator Robbie Burns has creative energy to burn . . .

. . . physical and mental, sexual and literary, constructive and destructive. Coming of age in a small town peopled with big characters, he finds his new teacher Miss Peach the most unforgettable of all – his memories of her will haunt him for the rst of his life.

Everything I Knew is at once laugh-out-loud funny and cry-out-loud tragic – farcical, horrifying, confronting – and bursting with originality. It challenges our determination to believe in the innocence of childhood and adolescence, and yet again shows Peter Goldsworthy to be a master of shifting tone. There is no novel quite like it in Australian literature.

'Few of his Australian contemporaries are so skilled at the narrative arts as Goldworthy, let alone so fearless in seeking new, rather than familiar, fictional ground to work.'
Peter Pierce, SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

'Intelligent, complex and deeply affecting.'
Murray Bramwell, ADELAIDE REVIEW

'A bawdy, honest, funny, tragic book about the aspirations of the young and how life happens to them. One of the best novels this year. Simply brilliant.'
Ian Nichols, WEST AUSTRALIAN

Everything I Knew

It's the year 1964, and fourteen-year-old know-it-all Robbie Burns is about to discover he still has a lot to learn.

The world is changing fast, although the news has yet to reach the small South Australian town of Penola. There Robbie leads and idyllic life of rabbiting, backyard science experiments, and hooligan scrapes with his friend Billy. Penola is oblivious even to its minor celebrity as the birthplace of the poet John Shaw Neilson, but poetry means the world to Robbie's new teacher from the city, the stylish Miss Peach, a sixties sophisticate with stirrup pants, Kool cigarettes and Vespa scooter.

Miss Peach's artistic yearnings and modern ways prove too much for the good people of Penola, but they fire Robbie's precocious imagination and burgeoning sexuality, until what begins as a schoolboy fantasy has terrible, real consequences.

Everything I Knew challenges our determination to believe in the innocence of childhood and adolescence. Yet again it shows Peter Goldsworthy to be a master of shifting tone, from the comic to the tragic, and 'one of the few Australian writers to command superb technique' (Sydney Morning Herald)

List Of All Answers

Peter Goldsworthy is described as Australia's best short-story writer - this collection of his work, from a period of more than 20 years, shows why. These stories are by turns funny, dark, sad and always addictively readable. A dazzling new story is included. From the acclaimed author of the superb Three Dog Night.

Three Dog Night

Is it possible to be too much in love? After ten years in London, Martin Blackman returns to Adelaide with his wife and fellow psychiatrist Lucy, blissfully happy. But then he introduces her to his old friend Felix, once a brilliant surgeon, now barred from practising and changed beyond recognition. In the complex triangle that develops, Martin must decide just how far he is prepared to go for Felix. So begins the darkest of journeys for all three of them . . .

Maestro

Against the backdrop of Darwin, that small, tropical hothouse of a port, half–outback, half–oriental, lying at the tip of northern Australia, a young and newly arrived southerner encounters the 'maestro', a Viennese refugee with a shadowed past. The occasion is a piano lesson, the first of many...

Honk If You Are Jesus

From the pen of Peter Goldsworthy a modern champion of the lost art of storytelling comes Honk If You Are Jesus, a bestselling novel that resists categorisation, and explodes expectations. Keep your hand on the horn during this startling comic fiction.

Navel Gazing

Funny, wise, idiosyncratic and original, these occasional essays chart a course through the various genres of writing that Peter Goldsworthy has investigated: fiction, science fiction, poetry, opera and film. Spiced with often hilarious personal anecdotes and references to the wide-ranging reading of a self-confessed 'hick autodidact', Goldsworthy offers a book that is at once a writing manual for various literary disciplines, and a loose, extended exploration of his key themes and obsessions: death, humour, the limits of language, the relationship of biology to thought and culture, and the role and responsibilities of art. And first love also gets a look in . . .

'A rare intelligence, combining a scientific and poetic appreciation of life, each expressed with great elegance and love of language.'
The Sunday Age

True Blue: On Being Australian

Australians mostly live in cities, yet many of our favourite movie characters are working men from the bush. We revere our sporting heroes, yet we prize their larrikin irreverence. Each year we enthusiastically commemorate a battle we lost.

What makes us Australian? Why is it so hard to put a finger on what makes us unique?

At the beginning of this new century, waves of immigration and our embrace of a wider world have made Australia a highly cosmopolitan culture. This lively collection from across the continent reminds us of our varied heritage, highlights our common connections and sometimes discerns what Peter Goldsworthy calls 'a national temperament'. It shows us we have much of which to be proud.

True Blue? draws together novelists, journalists, poets, cultural icons, historians, commentators, photographers and painters, old voices and new voices, who reflect on the stories we tell about ourselves and the myths we cultivate. By turns funny, ironic, penetrating, provocative and inspiring, True Blue? is a great companion for a day at the beach?or in the bush.