Readings.com.au: Readings Recommends: Australian Fiction

Best Of The Best: Top Australian Stories from Six Years' Collections Editor

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 awareness, passion to peace, desperation to determination (and at least one quiet triumph). There are twenty-five different worlds between these covers, and their authors will take you on a journey into all of them.

Smoke In The Room

The searing new novel from the internationally-acclaimed author of Taming the Beast, The Gospel According to Luke and Princesses & Pornstars.

Wanting

Shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

It is 1839. A young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, is running through the long wet grass of an island at the end of the world to get help for her dying father, an Aboriginal chieftain. Twenty years later, on at island at the centre of the world, the most famous novelist of the day, Charles Dickens, realises he is about to abandon his wife, risk his name, and forever after be altered because of his inability any longer to control his intense passion.

Connecting the two events are the most celebrated explorer of the age, Sir John Franklin - then governor of Van Diemen's Land - and his wife, Lady Jane, who adopt Mathinna, seen as one of the last of a dying race, as an experiment. Lady Jane believes the distance between savagery and civilisation is the learned capacity to control wanting. The experiment fails, Sir John disappears into the blue ice of the Arctic seeking the North-West Passage, and a decade later Lady Jane enlists Dickens' aid to put an end to the scandalous suggestions that Sir John's expedition ended in cannibalism.

Dickens becomes ever more entranced in the story of men entombed in ice, recognising in its terrible image his own frozen inner life. He produces and stars in a play inspired by Franklin's fate to give story to his central belief: that discipline and will can conquer desire. And yet the play will bring him to the point where he is finally no longer able to control his own passion and the consequences it brings.

Based on historic events, WANTING is a novel about art, love, and the way in which life is finally determined never by reason, but only ever by wanting.

Hollywood Ending

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 places where Hollywood celebrities have died.

In rundown Echo Park they find the squalid apartment where a second-rate silent movie star stabbed himself to death. Its current tenant is Hank, an old man with a mysterious past.

While Benji dives deeper into the cult of celebrity death, Hank and Hilda make an unlikely pair. Then Jake the screenwriter turns up. What's his story?

Hollywood Ending is a thriller, a comedy about the weirdness of growing up, and a wry love-letter to Los Angeles.

Kathy Charles has written a debut novel to die for.

Wonders Of A Godless World

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 powerful and apocalyptic tale that sweeps the reader from the beginning of time to the end of the earth.

On an unnamed island, in a Gothic hospital sitting in the shadow of a volcano, a wordless orphan girl works on the wards housing the insane and the incapable. When a silent, unmoving and unnerving new patient - a foreigner - arrives at the hospital, strange phenomena occur, bizarre murders take place, and the lives of the patients and the island's inhabitants are thrown into turmoil. What happens between them is an extraordinary exploration of consciousness, reality and madness.

Wonders of a Godless World, the new novel from Miles Franklin-winner Andrew McGahan, is a huge and dramatic beast of a book. It is a thought-provoking investigation into character and consciousness, a powerful cautionary tale, and a head-stretching fable about the earth, nature and the power of the mind. It is utterly unlike anything you've read before - it will take you by the shoulders and hold you in its grip to its nerve-tingling finale.

The Virtuoso

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 eyes on him.

London‚ November 1945: at a bohemian party‚ a young music student meets the charismatic concert pianist Noël Mewton−Wood. The two immediately become lovers‚ and the affair unleashes an overwhelming passion as grand and sublime as the music they both love.

Ten years on‚ the student‚ now a successful writer‚ reflects on the affair‚ the forces that shaped him and the one he adored‚ and the romantic obsession that ruled and almost ruined his life.

This assured‚ beautifully written debut novel is inspired by the brilliant life of Australian pianist Noel Mewton−Wood. Sonia Orchard vividly evokes the artistic world of post−war London in a novel of striking illuminations about music and imagination that is also a compelling and deeply moving love story.

The True Story Of Butterfish

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 fringe. Her eyes were dark and already she was playing some kind of game with me, or that's how it seemed. Her voice was a little deeper and huskier than I might have expected, so her last line had come out with a hint of something that might have been menace or even seductiveness or just a pitch at adult banter. Whatever it was, it stuck with me and it punctuated the moment and it didn't feel quite right for a conversation with a schoolgirl on my doorstep.

With his chart-topping band, Butterfish, Curtis Holland lived the cliched rock dream. Residing in hotels and recording studios, travelling in custom-built buses, he got married after a soundcheck in a wedding chapel in Nevada and barely noticed when his wife left him in Louisville.

But no dream lasts forever.

When Annaliese Winter walks down Curtis Holland's front path, he's ill-prepared for a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who's a confounding mixture of adult and child. He's back in Brisbane trying to build a life and he is not used to having a neighbour at all.

So when Curtis receives an invitation to dinner from Annaliese's mother, Kate, he is surprised when he not only accepts but finds himself being drawn to this remarkably unremarkable family. Even to fifteen-year-old Mark who is at war with his own surging adolescence.

Curtis soon realises that with Kate divorced, Annaliese and Mark need a male role model in their lives, but it's hard for him to help when he's just starting to grow up himself and harder still when Annaliese begins to show an interest in him that is less than filial.

Filled with acute observation, humour and tenderness, Butterfish is Nick Earls at his very best.

The Spare Room

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 believes will cure her. From the moment Nicola steps off the plane, Helen becomes her nurse, her protector, her guardian angel and her stony judge.

The Spare Room tells a story of compassion and rage as the two women—one sceptical, one stubbornly serene—negotiate their way through Nicola's gruelling treatments. Garner's dialogue is pitch perfect, her sense of pacing flawless as this novel draws to its terrible and transcendent finale.

Things We Didn't See Coming

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 offers a sharp-eyed perspective on a hardscrabble future, as a boy jettisons his family and all other ties in order to survive as a journeyman in an uncertain landscape. By turns led by love, larceny, and a new sexual order, he must avoid capture and imprisonment, starvation, pandemic, and some particularly bad weather.

In Things We Didn’t See Coming, Steven Amsterdam links together nine luminous narratives through the mind of one peripatetic and resourceful wanderer who always has one eye on the exit door and the other on a future that shifts more drastically and more often than anyone would like to imagine.

"Something very strange happens upon finishing Steven Amsterdam's (remarkably assured and kind of masterful) stories: what should be a bum trip through a variety of dystopias – foodless worlds; heartless periods of ceaseless rain and savagery; breakouts of peace and plenty marked by venality and ambition; biblical pestilence and illness – ends up anything but; one puts down the book feeling something close to hope. Perhaps it's the life-is-long, cyclical wisdom of it all, maybe it's a new-found appreciation for the Here And Now, although I'm inclined to think it's just gratitude that there are such writers around." -David Rakoff

www.stevenamsterdam.com

Reunion

Old friendships are expected to maintain their shape despite distance‚ lovers‚ careers‚ new friends. But twenty years is a long time.

Ava is an internationally acclaimed novelist who carries with her a lifetime of secrets.

Helen‚ a brilliant and dedicated molecular biologist‚ is faced with unexpected moral dilemmas as she finds herself drawn into bioterrorism research.

Conrad is a philosopher with a popular media profile and a desire for a much younger woman.

And Jack‚ whose career has stalled in the light of his long unrequited love for Ava‚ is a scholar of the history and culture of Islam.

It is Ava′s husband‚ Harry‚ a man for whom the others can barely conceal their disdain‚ who has drawn them back to Melbourne where they first met at university.

As they deal with the reality of their present lives and their memories of the past‚ none will be unchanged by the reunion. And not everyone will survive.

Andrea Goldsmith has created a story of love‚ power‚ friendship and betrayal that is as gripping as it is exquisitely insightful.

The Pages

Shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Erica Hazelhurst, a philosopher from Sydney, has been given a project by her university to work on the papers of the late Wesley Antill (The Pages). She travels across the Blue Mountains to his country property with her psychologist friend Sophie.

Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature

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 essential addition to every Australian's library.

'Unprecedented in the breadth of what it offers from both the ancient and the recent literature of the country.' - Thomas Keneally Some of the best, most significant writing produced in Australia over more than two centuries is gathered in this landmark anthology. Covering all genres - from fiction, poetry and drama to diaries, letters, essays and speeches - the anthology maps the development of one of the great literatures in English in all its energy and variety. The writing reflects the diverse experiences of Australians in their encounter with their extraordinary environment and with themselves. This is literature of struggle, conflict and creative survival. It is literature of lives lived at the extremes, of frontiers between cultures, of new dimensions of experience, where imagination expands. This rich, informative and entertaining collection charts the formation of an Australian voice that draws inventively on Indigenous words, migrant speech and slang, with a cheeky, subversive humour always to the fore. For the first time, Aboriginal writings are interleaved with other English-language writings throughout - from Bennelong's 1796 letter to the contemporary flowering of Indigenous fiction and poetry - setting up an exchange that reveals Australian history in stark new ways. From vivid settler accounts to haunting gothic tales, from raw protest to feisty urban satire and playful literary experiment, from passionate love poetry to moving memoir, the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature reflects the creative eloquence of a society. Chosen by a team of expert editors, who have provided illuminating essays about their selections, and with more than 500 works from over 300 authors, it is an authoritative survey and a rich world of reading to be enjoyed. The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature is published in association with Macquarie University, Sydney and Sydney Centre of International PEN.

About General editor: Nicholas Jose General editor Nicholas Jose is a novelist, essayist and scholar. He is Chair in Writing at the University of Western Sydney.

Dreams Of Speaking

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 she has felt not quite connected. She arrives in Paris to write; ironically this is where her former lover, Stephen, is living. Still in love with her, Stephen tries to rekindle the relationship, but for Alice it is finished. She sees Paris with an outsider's eye; from her window she looks down onto a schoolyard and invents names and personalities to go with the people she observes. On a train returning from Chartres she strikes up a conversation with an elderly Japanese man who introduces himself as Mr Sakamato. An independent scholar, Mr Sakamoto is working on a biography on Alexander Graham Bell. Together they share a fascination for modernity. 'We must be friends, Alice Black,' Mr Sakamoto announces. Their friendship develops as they tell each other their stories and their ideas. Mr Sakamoto is a survivor of Nagasaki and his sharing of this trauma with Alice helps her to become more grounded. He tells and shows her things she didn't know. This is a beautifully realised novel about loneliness, friendship and ideas. Mark Rubbo is from Readings Carlton

Readings and Writings: Forty Years in Books

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 locations around town, the shop has long been a focus for local literature, art and culture.

Readings and Writings is a collection of new Australian short stories from writers who have been involved with Readings over the years. All have contributed freely to celebrate the shop and its achievements, and to assist The Readings Foundation in supporting literacy, the arts and the community.

Featuring new stories from Alex Miller, Peter Goldsworthy, Cate Kennedy, Christos Tsiolkas, Mark Seymour, Paddy O’Reilly, Chris Womersley, Kate Holden, Elliot Perlman, Myfanwy Jones, Tony Birch, Steven Amsterdam and more.

All proceeds from the sale of this book will go to The Readings Foundation.

Foreword by Mark Rubbo, introduction by Shane Maloney and stories by:

Alex Miller
Cate Kennedy
Robert Egan
Chris Womersley
Jenny Sinclair
Michael McGirrv
Peter Goldsworthy
Josephine Rowe
Christos Tsiolkas
Myfanwy Jones
Kalinda Ashton
Mark Seymour
Barry Divola
Amy Tsilemanis
Louise Swinn
Chris Grierson
Elliot Perlman
Paddy O'Reilly
Miles Allinson
Tony Birch
Catherine Harris
Paul Mitchell
David Cohen
Leanne Hall
Kate Holden
Steven Amsterdam

See the full cover image by James Gulliver Hancock here.

See independent reviews at The Enthusiast and LiteraryMinded on Crikey.

Read editor Jason Cotter's account of editing the book and see the photo shoot with the writers and editors of the anthology here.

The Best Australian Stories 2009

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 the country's best-loved authors, as well as exciting new work from up-and-coming young writers. This is a perfect book for summer and a delightful introduction to Australia's best contemporary writing.

Previous contributors include David Malouf, Kate Grenville, Nam Le, Frank Moorhouse, Peter Goldsworthy, Mandy Sayer, Marion Halligan, Nicholas Shakespeare, Carmel Bird, Venero Armanno, Cate Kennedy, Sophie Cunningham and many others.

Tender Morsels

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, conscious and unconscious, temporal and spiritual, human and beast From girl to witch to woman. From boy to beast to man. From hell to heaven to the real world.

Liga is a young peasant girl of no consequence. Abused by her father (who plies her with potions to induce miscarriages that destroy all evidence of his shame), then raped by callous youths, she has two beautiful babies. One day she is saved by natural magic and, in exchange for her earthly life, her world is changed into her own personal Heaven, given to her by natural magic. Safe in this nurturing world, Liga builds a life of loving domesticity for her daughters, gentle Branza and curious Urdda, who grow up there, protected from all that once harmed Liga: violence, sexual predation and village prejudice. What is this potent place? Is it the idealized world of Liga's imagination, a shared unconscious, or the realm of myth and magic?

But back in the real world, hedge-witch Muddy Annie, begged by a desperate, debt-ridden friend, tries sending him to his own Heaven. Her botched attempt puts him instead into the world of Liga and her daughters, and gives him on arrival the power to turn wildflowers to coins, frog-eggs to pearls, tiny birds to precious stones and to pass back into the real world with the wealth he gathers. But his numerous journeys create perforations in the skin between the real world and the magic world.

Although these generally have no effect, on Bear Day every spring the fur-costumed Bears running the ritual chase through the village sometimes tumble through, transformed from lusty young men into real, wild bears in Liga's Heaven.

How far can you take your fantasies before they grow dangerous? How fully can you protect your children, and how completely should you? Built on a mythic scaffolding, Tender Morsels asks timeless questions about what it is to be human, and explores the evil and sweetness in the world and reveals the essential magic of learning to live with both.

A long-awaited novel from an author acclaimed for the fearless range of her imagination, the emotional intensity of her stories, and the virtuosity of her writing.

A story of astonishing beauty, originality and power.

The Story Of Danny Dunn

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 run The Hero, a favourite neighbourhood pub, and Danny is a local hero.

Luck changes for Danny when he signs up to go to war. He returns home a physically broken man, to a life that will be changed for ever. Together with Helen, a woman of strength, character and intelligence who becomes his wife, he sets about rebuilding his life. It is a life tormented by personal demons, and shaped by compassion, corruption, love and power - and the gift of twin daughters, Sam and Gabby.

Set against a backdrop of Australian pubs and politics, The Story of Danny Dunn is an Australian family saga spanning three generations. It is a compelling tale of love, ambition and the destructive power of obsession, at a time of great change in Australia's history.

Maralinga

The power to love, the power to hate, the power to destroy human existence ... MARALINGA has them all!

During the darkest days of the Cold War, in the remote wilderness of a South Australian desert, the future of an infant nation is being decided . . . without its people's knowledge.

A British airbase in the middle of nowhere; an atomic weapons testing ground; an army of raw youth led by powerful, ambitious men - a cocktail for disaster. Such is Maralinga in the spring of 1956.

MARALINGA is a story of British Lieutenant Daniel Gardiner, who accepts a twelve-month posting to the wilds of South Australia on a promise of rapid promotion; Harold Dartleigh, Deputy Director of MI-6 and his undercover operative Gideon Melbray; Australian Army Colonel Nick Stratton and the enigmatic Petraeus Mitchell, bushman and anthropologist. They all find themselves in a violent and unforgiving landscape, infected with the unique madness and excitement that only nuclear testing creates.

MARALINGA is also a story of love; a love so strong that it draws the adventurous young English journalist Elizabeth Hoffmann halfway around the world in search of the truth. And MARALINGA is a story of heartbreak; heartbreak brought to the innocent First Australians who had walked their land unhindered for 40,000 years.

Maralinga . . . a desolate place where history demands an emerging nation choose between hell and reason.

Barley Patch

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 experience. It is funny, self-deprecating, personal, as well as thoughtful and reflective, and enchanting in its clarity, detail and evocations of Australian life and landscape.

Parrot and Olivier in America

Short listed for the American Book Award.

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.

When Olivier sets sail for the New World - ostensibly to study its prisons, but in reality to avoid yet another revolution - Parrot is sent with him, as spy, protector, foe and foil. Through their adventures with women and money, incarceration and democracy, writing and painting, they make an unlikely pair. But where better for unlikely things to flourish than in the glorious, brand-new experiment, America?

A dazzlingly inventive reimagining of Alexis de Tocqueville's famous journey, Parrot and Olivier in America brilliantly evokes the Old World colliding with the New. Above all, it is a wildly funny, tender portrait of two men who come to form an almost impossible friendship, and a completely improbable work of art.

Father's Day

‘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 invisible ties that bind — Birch’s subject matter is ordinary life, lit from within with an honesty which makes his characters and their travails achingly familiar.’ Cate Kennedy

Lovesong

Seeking shelter in a Parisian cafe from a sudden rainstorm, John Patterner meets the exotic Sabiha and his carefully mapped life changes forever. Resonant of the bestselling Conditions of Faith, Alex Miller's keenly awaited new novel tells the deeply moving story of their lives together, and of how each came undone by desire.

Strangers did not, as a rule, find their way to Chez Dom, a small, rundown Tunisian cafe on Paris' distant fringes. Run by the widow Houria and her young niece, Sabiha, the cafe offers a home away from home for the North African immigrant workers working at the great abattoirs of Vaugiraud, who, like them, had grown used to the smell of blood in the air. But when one day a lost Australian tourist, John Patterner, seeks shelter in the cafe from a sudden Parisian rainstorm, the quiet simplicities of their lives are changed forever. John is like no-one Sabiha has met before - his calm grey eyes promise her a future she was not yet even aware she wanted. Theirs becomes a contented but unlikely marriage - a marriage of two cultures lived in a third - and yet because they are essentially foreigners to each other, their love story sets in train an irrevocable course of tragic events.

Years later, living a small, quiet life in suburban Melbourne, what happened at Vaugiraud seems like a distant, troubling dream to Sabiha and John, who confides the story behind their seemingly ordinary lives to Ken, an ageing, melancholy writer. It is a story about home and family, human frailties and passions, raising questions of morals and purpose - questions have no simple answer.

Lovesong is a simple enough story in many ways - the story of a marriage, of people coming undone by desire, of ordinary lives and death, love and struggle - but when told with Miller's distinctive voice, which is all intelligence, clarity and compassion, it has a real gravitas, it resonates and is deeply moving. Into the wonderfully evoked contemporary settings of Paris and Melbourne, memories of Tunisian family life, culture and its music are tenderly woven.

Read Angel Meyer's interview with Alex Miller about Lovesong.

The Essence Of The Thing

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 living room when she returns is not the adorable, straightforward, devoted Jonathan with whom she has been sharing her life and flat for the past six weeks. That Jonathan would never have simply, unilaterally, decided that she should, as he abruptly put it, ‘move out.’

So a shocked, grief-stricken Nicola packs her bags and sets out bravely on the bumpy course that will take her fro the hellish end of an affair to the essence of the thing. So too does the brilliant Madeleine St John, whose vision is both comic and tender, take us into the changing nature of the human heart.

‘My mother sent you this,’ he said. ‘Oh?’ ‘I believe it’s some marmalade,’ he said ‘From the latest batch. ‘How kind,’ said Nicola, opening the bag. ‘You haven’t told them, then?’ ‘Told them what?’ ‘That we’re no longer in a shared marmalade situation…’

The Boat

Winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction 2009.

'The Boat raises the bar for Australian writing.'
PETER CRAVEN, Heat

'Nam Le is . . . a distributor of the peace.

'Consider the subjects of his stories: a child assassin in Colombia ('Cartagena'), an ageing New York artist desperate for a reconciliation with his daughter ('Meeting Elise'), a boy's coming of age in a rough Victorian fishing town ('Halflead Bay'), before the first atomic bomb falls in Japan ('Hiroshima'), The suffocations of theocracy in Iran ('Tehran Calling'). This astonishing range is topped and tailed by accounts of the uneasy reunion of a young Vietnamese writer in America with his ex-soldier father, and by the title story – the escape of a group of exhausted refugees from the Vietcong in a wallowing boat.

'One might be permitted to think, after all this high seriousness and intensity, Nam Le can't do funny. But this criminally talented 29-year-old can do that as well.'
BARRY OAKLEY, Australian Literary Review

'Stunning'
The Times

'A fearless new Australian voice that accepts no geographical limits: these are stories of leaping power and the most breath-taking grace and intimacy.'
HELEN GARNER

'Wonderful stories that snarl and pant across our crazed world . . . an extraordinary performance. Nam Le is a heartbreaker, not easily forgotten.'
JUNOT DIAZ

'The fiction debut of the year.'
JAMES LEY, Australian Book Review

'The best book debut of 2008.'
New York Magazine

'The runaway literary success of 2008.'
Weekend Australian

The World Beneath

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 — although they’ve gone about it in very different ways. About the only thing they have in common these days is their fifteen-year-old daughter, Sophie.

When the perennially restless Rich decides to take Sophie, who he hardly knows, on a six-day walk into the Tasmanian wilderness, his overconfidence and her growing disillusion with him set off a chain of events that none of them could have predicted. Instead of respect, Rich finds antagonism in the relationship he hoped to create with Sophie, and, in the vast wilderness he once felt an affinity with, nothing but disorientation and fear. The uneasy truce established long ago between Rich and Sandy is shattered when he and Sophie leave the track to explore the remote terrain known as the Labyrinth.

As days pass with no word, all three characters begin to understand that if they are to survive, each must traverse not only the secret territories that lie between them but also those within themselves.

The Australian Long Story

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 stories, characters grow up, hook up and break up, endure calamitous loss and discover delectable love, travel to faraway places and fifi nd themselves right back where they started. From the exotic to the familiar, the sensuous to the dangerous and with regarded authors such as Nam Le, Tim Winton and David Malouf this book promises delight to all lovers of Australian fiction.

Showcasing the talents of some of our most loved and awarded authors, this invigorating collection is an excellent introduction to an often overlooked art form, promising to enchant all lovers of Australian fiction.

In this collection, acclaimed writer Mandy Sayer brings together nine of the finest Australian examples of the long story - tales that combine the intensity of the short story with the complexity of a novel.