Fiction > Australian

No Description

No Description

Traces the experiences of Sally Morgan's life, growing up in Perth in the 50s & 60s. Through the memories and images of her childhood and adolescence, vague hints and echoes begin to emerge and a fascinating story unfolds - a mystery of identity, complete with clues and suggested solutions. 2004-5 HSC English prescribed text.

Every night for twenty nights in a hotel room in Venice, an Australian man recently diagnosed with an incurable disease writes a letter home to a friend. In these letters he reflects on questions of mortality, seduction and the search for paradise in deeply life-enhancing ways. Papberback (B-Format)

In this remarkable self-portrait, Patrick White explains how on the very rare occasions when he re-reads a passage from one of his books, he recognises very little of the self he knows. This 'unknown' is the man interviewers and visiting students expect to find, but 'unable to produce him', he prefers to remain private, or as private as anyone who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature can ever be. In this book, it is the self Patrick White does recognise, the one he sees reflected in the glass.

Meet Merlin. He's Lucy's bright, beautiful son - who just happens to be autistic. Since Merlin's father left them in the lurch shortly after his diagnosis, Lucy has made Merlin the centre of her world. Struggling with the joys and tribulations of raising her eccentrically adorable yet challenging child, (if only Merlin came with operating instructions) Lucy doesn't have room for any other man in her life. By the time Merlin turns ten, Lucy is seriously worried that the Pope might start ringing her up for tips on celibacy, so resolv... read more

Two children are brought to a wild garden on the shores of Sydney Harbour to shelter from the Second World War. The boy's mother has died in the Blitz. The girl is the daughter of a Sydney woman and a Communist executed in a Greek prison. In wartime Australia, these two children form an extraordinary bond as they negotiate the dangers of life as strangers abandoned on the far side of the world. With the tenderness and rigour of an old, wise novelist, Patrick White explores the world of these children, the city of his childhood and ... read more

This is a story of right and wrong, and how sometimes they look the same. 1926: Tom Sherbourne is a young lighthouse keeper on a remote island off Western Australia. The only inhabitants of Janus Rock, he and his wife Isabel live a quiet life, cocooned from the rest of the world. One April morning a boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a crying infant - and the path of the couple's lives hits an unthinkable crossroads. Only years later do they discover the devastating consequences of the decision they made that day - as the b... read more

Early sixties in Sydney. Women wear princess-line dresses, edge-to-edge duster coats, gloves, perfectly matched handbags and shoes and seamed stockings. They are defined by the vital statistics of their bust, waist and hip measurements and if they are over thirty they re over the hill. Kings Cross is bohemian, Paddington is pre-gentrified and the crowd at Beppi's and the Ozone charge their boozy lunches to job numbers. At the advertising agency Bofinger Adams Rawson & Keane, two talented women hold important creative roles. One... read more

The story of two brothers from 'The Springs' (a fictional former spa town near Brisbane); one a soldier peacekeeper with the UN and one a sculptor. Set in 1993 in northern Africa (Morocco, Western Sahara and Algeria) and in the US years later, it follows the journey of Sebastian (Bas), the sculptor brother, who must go in search of his missing brother, Jack. His journey is a modern-day Heart of Darkness as he travels into the dangerous, war-torn, desert interior of northern Africa to discover what happened to his brother. What he f... read more

Beautiful beaches, sexy young backpackers, cheap drinks: southern Thailand in the mid-1990s is the perfect place for a holiday. It's also the perfect place for Billy-Loyalist hard man, NO SURRENDER chest tattoo, on the run from the Belfast police-to lie low. He's turning away from a life of crime, but isn't sure where to go. A series of fights and one-night stands helps put his troubles out of mind for a while. But when Billy ends up in a Buddhist retreat he learns that no matter how far you travel, your past will always catch up w... read more

Small, but perfectly formed...Augustus is not a dwarf. He's perfectly proportioned, just on a smaller scale than other people. Abandoned by his mother at the circus, he is taken on by Rosa, a fiery and supremely pragmatic girl who sees great opportunity in the power of Augustus's voice. For when the little boy opens his mouth and sings, everyone's most personal and cherished memories are evoked, reducing even the most belligerent to tears. So begins The Architecture of Song, a wonderfully quirky novel that explores the notion of i... read more

Charlotte-Rose de la Force has been banished from court by the Sun King, Louis XIV, after a series of scandalous love affairs. She is comforted by an old nun, Sur Seraphina, who tells her the tale of a young girl who, a hundred years earlier, is sold by her parents for a handful of bitter greens. .After Margherita's father steals a handful of greens - parsley, wintercress and rapunzel - from the walled garden of the courtesan, Selena Leonelli, they give up their daughter to save him from having both hands cut off. Selena is the fam... read more

The Mothers' Group tells the story of six very different women who agree to regularly meet soon after the births of their babies. Set during the first crucial year of their babies' lives, The Mothers' Group tracks the women's individual journeys - and the group's collective one - as they navigate birth and motherhood as well as the shifting ground of their relationships with their partners. Each woman strives in her own way to become the mother she wants to be, and finds herself becoming increasingly reliant on the friendship and s... read more

Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a na ve young woman. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Voss sets out to cross the continent. As hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases. Laura, waiting in Sydney, moves through the months of separation as if they were a dream and Voss the only reality. From the careful... read more

The Chemistry of Tears is both wildly entertaining and deeply moving, a portrait of love and loss that is simultaneously delicate and anarchic. At its heart is an image only the masterful Peter Carey could breath such life into - an object made of equal parts magic, art and science, a delight that contains the seeds of our age's downfall.
When Catherine's lover dies suddenly, she has no one to turn to - their affair had been disguised from their colleagues and his family - except her work. A middle-aged curator in a London... read more

The past isn't dead. It isn't even past Jodie Garrow is a teenager from the wrong side of the tracks when she falls pregnant. Scared, alone and desperate to make something of her life, she makes the decision to adopt out her baby; and tells nobody. Twenty-five years on, Jodie has built a whole new life and a whole new family.

Gool Mahommed worships Allah and Lifebuoy soap. In 1914 he returns to Broken Hill, five years after he was sent back to his homeland by his mentor and benefactor, Abdullah. A camel driver and mullah, Abdullah has learned through bitter experience that small-town Australia is not the place to be a Muslim immigrant. But Mahommed is ready to embrace the Anglo-Australian lifestyle and has hopeful visions of himself as an assimilated citizen, a practitioner of the habits of English gentlemen, and eventually a prosperous owner of a subma... read more

Even the Jordan children - Petra, Isaak and Paul - can feel it coming, shaking the edges of their privileged, protected expat world. Years later, Diana, an Australian development worker, moves to Jakarta and becomes entwined in the powerful Jordans' adult lives. As the monsoon descends, and the Jordans begin to fall apart, Diana sinks into the half-light of their past, where rumour and religion define the contours of the real, and the rules of the game change according to who is playing. Set in a global city of poverty, beauty, cor... read more