Showing 1-20 of 24 Books
Author: Frank Moorhouse Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Winner of the Queensland Literary Award. Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and the Barbara Jefferis Prize. 'Any of Frank Moorhouse's books are rewarding and stimulating. But his trilogy following a young Australian diplomat at the founding of the League of Nations is a masterpiece. In Edith Campbell Berry, his heroine, he created one of the enduring characters in literature. The trilogy is Grand Days, Dark Palace and Cold Light. All are must reads.' - Michael Williams, Qantas magazine It is 1950, the League of Nations has collapsed and the newly formed United Nations has rejected all those who worked and fought for the...
Author: Liane Moriarty Genre: Contemporary Fiction
From the no. 1 New York Times bestselling author of The Husband's Secret and Big Little Lies SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM THE DIRECTOR OF THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA "Funny and knowing... [about] what we choose to remember, and fight to forget." O magazine When Alice Love surfaces from a beautiful dream to find she's been injured in a gym, she knows that something is very wrong - she hates exercise. Alice's first concern is her baby, she's pregnant with her first child, and she's desperate to see her husband, Nick, who she knows will be worried about her. But Alice isn't...
Author: Liane Moriarty Genre: Contemporary Fiction
The no 1. New York Times bestseller from the author of Big Little Lies and new novel Apples Never Fall. "A staggeringly brilliant novel. It is literally unputdownable." Mail on Sunday How well do you know your husband? Cecilia Fitzpatrick, devoted mother, successful Tupperware business owner and efficient P&C President, has found a letter from her husband. "For my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick, to be opened only in the event of my death" But Cecilia's husband isn't dead, he's on a business trip. And when she questions him about it on the phone, Cecilia senses something she hasn't experienced before. John-Paul is lying. What happens...
Author: Tara June Winch Genre: Contemporary Fiction
The yield in English is the reaping, the things that man can take from the land. In the language of the Wiradjuri yield is the things you give to, the movement, the space between things: baayanha. Knowing that he will soon die, Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi takes pen to paper. His life has been spent on the banks of the Murrumby River at Prosperous House, on Massacre Plains. Albert is determined to pass on the language of his people and everything that was ever remembered. He finds the words on the wind. August Gondiwindi has been living on the other side of the world for ten...
Author: Frank Moorhouse Genre: Contemporary Fiction
'Any of Frank Moorhouse's books are rewarding and stimulating. But his trilogy following a young Australian diplomat at the founding of the League of Nations is a masterpiece. In Edith Campbell Berry, his heroine, he created one of the enduring characters in literature. The trilogy is Grand Days, Dark Palace and Cold Light. All are must reads.' - Michael Williams, Qantas magazine On a train from Paris to Geneva, Edith Campbell Berry meets Major Ambrose Westwood in the dining car, makes his acquaintance over a lunch of six courses, and allows him to kiss her passionately.Their early intimacy binds them together once they reach...
Author: Kathy Lette Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Ruby has always been the generous mediator among her friends, family and colleagues, which is why they have all turned up to celebrate her 50th birthday. But after a few too many glasses of champers, Ruby’s speech doesn’t exactly go to plan. Instead of delivering the witty and warm words her guests are expecting, Ruby takes her moment in the spotlight to reveal what she really thinks of every one of them. She also accuses her husband, Harry, of having an affair. Saving the best till last, Ruby lambasts her octogenarian mother for a lifetime of playing her three daughters...
Author: Markus Zusak Genre: Children & Young Adults, Contemporary Fiction
From the author of the international bestseller The Book Thief and upcoming new novel Bridge of Clay. "comedic, romantic, thrilling, confronting, playful, deceptive" Australian Book Review Meet Ed Kennedy - cab driving prodigy, pathetic card player and useless at sex (self-proclaimed). He lives in a suburban shack, shares coffee with his dog, the Doorman, and he's in nervous love with Audrey. His life is one of peaceful routine and incompetence - until he inadvertently stops a bank robbery. That's when the first Ace turns up. That's when Ed becomes the messenger. Chosen to care, he makes his way through town, helping and hurting...
Author: Omar Sakr Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Poet Omar Sakr's debut novel is a fierce and fantastic force that illuminates the bonds that bind families together as well as what can break them. An estranged father. An abused and abusive mother. An army of relatives. A tapestry of violence, woven across generations and geographies, from Turkey to Lebanon to Western Sydney. This is the legacy left to Jamal Smith, a young queer Muslim trying to escape a past in which memory and rumour trace ugly shapes in the dark. When every thread in life constricts instead of connects, how do you find a way to breathe? Torn...
Author: Rosalie Ham Genre: Contemporary Fiction
'A book that delights, appeals but never waivers in its brutal honesty. If you didn't laugh, you'd cry.' Sue Maslin, producer of The Dressmaker In a quiet farming town somewhere in country New South Wales, war is brewing. The last few years have been punishingly dry, especially for the farmers, but otherwise, it's all Neralie Mackintosh's fault. If she'd never left town then her ex, the hapless but extremely eligible Mitchell Bishop, would never have fallen into the clutches of the truly awful Mandy, who now lords it over everyone as if she owns the place. Now that Neralie has returned,...
Author: Liane Moriarty Genre: Contemporary Fiction
The no.1 New York Times bestseller from the author of The Husband's Secret and new novel Apples Never Fall. NOW AN EMMY AWARD WINNING HBO TELEVISION SERIES STARRING REESE WITHERSPOON, NICOLE KIDMAN & MERYL STREEP. Parents behaving badly ... a tragic accident ... or murder? What isn't in doubt is that someone is dead. Madeline is a force to be reckoned with: witty, noisy and passionate. She remembers everything and forgives no one. Celeste is the kind of beautiful woman who makes the world stop and stare. But perfection is often an illusion. Jane is a single mum with a mysterious past who...
Author: Debra Adelaide Genre: Contemporary Fiction
LONGLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE 2009 "Warm and moving ... quirky and unsentimental" The Age As I resigned myself to the fact that the latest Household Guide I'd written would be my last, I conceived in a flash the best idea ever. I rang Nancy and left a message. 'Think of the title,' I said. 'How catchy does The Household Guide to Dying sound?' When Delia Bennet-author and domestic advice columnist-is diagnosed with cancer, she knows it's time to get her house in order. After all, she's got to secure the future for her husband, their two daughters and their...
Author: Melina Marchetta Genre: Contemporary Fiction
'You look the type to break your father’s heart.' 'Yeah, but he broke mine first.’ When Rosie Gennaro first meets Jimmy Hailler, she has walked away from life in Sydney, leaving behind the place on Dalhousie that her father, Seb, painstakingly rebuilt for his family but never saw completed. Two years later, Rosie returns to the house and living there is Martha, whom Seb Gennaro married less than a year after the death of Rosie’s mother. Martha is struggling to fulfil Seb’s dream, while Rosie is coming to terms with new responsibilities. And so begins a stand-off between two women...
Author: Debra Adelaide Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Short Stories
LONGLISTED FOR THE STELLA PRIZE 2014 Debra Adelaide's new collection of short stories intricately maps both the sublime and the mundane landscape of ordinary lives, with her trademark dark wit and luminous intelligence. In Glory in the Flower, distinguished but disillusioned British poet, Bill, crosses the world on the promise of a prestigious literary festival only to find himself roughing it with an unlikely group of amateur poets, with surprising results. One man's attempt to negotiate the Australian taxation system reads like a noir thriller in The Pirate Map, and the minefield of internet dating in Chance artfully balances the...
Author: Glenda Guest Genre: Contemporary Fiction
After forty-five years in Sydney, Cassandra Aberline returns to her home town in the Western Australian wheat belt in the same way she left: on the Indian Pacific train. As they cross the emptiness of the vast Australian inland, Cassie travels back through her memories, too, frightened that she’s about to lose them forever—and with them, her last chance to answer the question that has haunted her almost all her life. ‘Platinum sounds expensive,’ she said. ‘But so worth it.’ The travel agent was a master at judging people. ‘And you get so much for it.’ He said a figure...
Author: Kathy Lette Genre: Contemporary Fiction
'By day, we were at school learning logarithms, but by night - in the back of cars, under the bowling alley, on Cronulla Beach, or, if you were lucky, in a bed while someone's parents were out - you paid off your friendship ring.' For Deb and Sue, life is about surfies, panel vans, straight-leg Levis, nicking off from school, getting wasted, friendships and fitting in. But why should guys have all the fun? When Deb and Sue decide to take to the waves on boards, a whole culture is upturned. Puberty Blues is raw, humorous and painfully honest. An...
Author: Frank Moorhouse Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. 'Any of Frank Moorhouse's books are rewarding and stimulating. But his trilogy following a young Australian diplomat at the founding of the League of Nations is a masterpiece. In Edith Campbell Berry, his heroine, he created one of the enduring characters in literature. The trilogy is Grand Days, Dark Palace and Cold Light. All are must reads.' - Michael Williams, Qantas magazine Five years have passed since Edith Campbell Berry's triumphant arrival at the League of Nations in Geneva, determined to right the wrongs of the world. The idealism of those early Grand Days has been eroded by a...
Author: Rosalie Ham Genre: Contemporary Fiction
The bestseller from the author of the upcoming new novel The Year of the Farmer. NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING KATE WINSLET AND LIAM HEMSWORTH Tilly Dunnage has come home to care for her mad old mother. She left the small Victorian town of Dungatar years before, and became an accomplished couturier in Paris. Now she earns her living making exquisite frocks for the people who drove her away when she was ten. Through the long Dungatar nights, she sits at her sewing machine, planning revenge. The Dressmaker is a modern Australian classic, much loved for its bittersweet humour. Set in...
Author: Kate Grenville Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction
Kate Grenville's Orange-Prize winning novel The Idea of Perfection is the story of the small town of Karakarook, and of Douglas Cheeseman and Harley Savage—two people who seem the least likely in the world to fall in love. Unlike Felicity Porcelline, a woman dangerously haunted by the idea of perfection, they come to understand that what looks like weakness can be the best kind of strength.   Kate Grenville is one of Australia's finest writers. Her bestselling novel The Secret River has been published in more than twenty countries. It has received numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was shortlisted for the Man...
Author: Geraldine Brooks Genre: Contemporary Fiction
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘March’ and ‘People of the Book’. A young woman’s struggle to save her family and her soul during the extraordinary year of 1666, when plague suddenly struck a small Derbyshire village. In 1666, plague swept through London, driving the King and his court to Oxford, and Samuel Pepys to Greenwich, in an attempt to escape contagion. The north of England remained untouched until, in a small community of leadminers and hill farmers, a bolt of cloth arrived from the capital. The tailor who cut the cloth had no way of knowing that the damp...
Author: Rosalie Ham Genre: Contemporary Fiction
From the author of bestseller The Dressmaker and upcoming novel The Year of the Farmer. Phoeba Crupp is a young woman who lives with her parents and sister on a small farm near Geelong in the 1890s. Her father is an eccentric ex-accountant who moved his family from the city in order to establish a vineyard, a decision her mother bitterly - and loudly - resents. While her sister makes a play for the local squatter's son, Phoeba is content with her best friend Harriet, until circumstances push her towards the world of men and money. Like Ham's first novel, The Dressmaker, Summer at Mount...