Sir John Franklin, the most celebrated explorer of his age, and his wife, Lady Jane, adopt Mathinna, a young Aboriginal girl, to prove that a savage can be civilised - only to discover that within the most civilised can lurk the...

Joe Cashin was different once. He moved easily then; was surer and less thoughtful. But there are consequences when you've come so close to dying. For Cashin, they included a posting away from the world of Homicide to the quiet...

A simple tale of pen-friendship between two very different people

The Boat takes us from a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit man in Colombia; from the city of Hiroshima just before the bomb is dropped to the haunting waste of the South China Sea in the wake of another war. Each story is...

David Malouf begins by describing, in loving evocative detail, the house in Brisbane where he was born and grew up, moving from room to room, always relating the smallest items in it to the life he remembers and his widening...

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, rich - and fiercely independent - 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...

Obsessed with the idea of creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material with which to fashion a new being, shocking his creation to life with electricity. But this botched creature, rejected by its...

The story is of one of the most famous investigations ever conducted by science into the mysteries of the world - and its disastrous ending in the even stranger mysteries of the world within.

Composed towards the end of the first millennium of our era, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is a Northern epic and a classic of European literature. In this new translation, Seamus Heaney has produced a work that is true, line by...

Based on thorough research by editors who knew and corresponded with the late poet, this extraordinary collection contains poems from all of Harwood's published books, a large section of unpublished work, and illuminating...