Celebrating Australian Fiction

The High Places cover image

The High Places

by Fiona McFarlane

The Night Guest introduced an Australian writer 'with the promise of literary greatness' (Los Angeles Times)  The High Places delivers on that promise.

The dazzling stories in this collection find those moments when people confront the strangeness and mystery of their lives. The revelations of intimidating old friends on holiday. An accident on a dark country road. A marine biologist in conversation with the ghost of Charles Darwin. The sudden arrival of American parachutists in a Queensland country town. A lottery win. A farmer troubled by miracles in the middle of a drought... more

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Ghost River

by Tony Birch

The river is a place of history and secrets.

For Ren and Sonny, two unlikely friends, it's a place of freedom and adventure. For a group of storytelling vagrants, it's a refuge. And for the isolated daughter of a cult reverend, it's an escape.

Each time they visit, another secret slips into its ancient waters. But change and trouble are coming – to the river and to the lives of those who love it. Who will have the courage to fight and survive and what will be the cost... more

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Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

Whilst living in exile on St Helena, Napoleon exerted an extraordinary influence on young Betsy Balcombe. How did she get from Napoleon's side to the Australian bush?

When Tom Keneally discovered by chance at the National Gallery of Victoria that Betsy Balcombe, a young girl living on St Helena while the Emperor Napoleon was exiled there, had become the Emperor's ‘intimate friend and annoyer', and had then emigrated with her family to Australia, he was impelled to begin another extraordinary novel, exploring the intersection between the ordinary people of the world and those we deem exceptional... more

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Mercy Street

by Tess Evans

Mercy Street tells the heartwarming story of curmudgeonly pensioner George, who, since his wife's death, is living a life that is no more than the sum of his 'worn-out, washed out days'. A childless widower, his life has narrowed to trips to the shop, occasional visits from his bossy sister Shirl and afternoons in the pub with his old mate Redgum.

But one day, everything changes when Angie, a nineteen-year-old single mother, unexpectedly saves his life. George grudgingly acknowledges his debt to her, and later, when Angie asks for a favour, he has no choice but to agree... more

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Six Bedrooms

by Tegan Bennett Daylight

Tegan Bennett Daylight's powerful collection captures the dangerous, tilting terrain of becoming adult.

Six Bedrooms is about growing up; about discovering sex; and about coming of age. Full of glorious angst, embarrassment and small achievements. Hot afternoons on school ovals, the terrifying promise of losing your virginity, sneaking booze from your mother's pantry, the painful sophistication and squalor of your first share house, cancer, losing a parent.

Over these ten stories, we find acute portrayals of loss and risk, of sexual longing and wreckage, blunders and betrayals... more

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The Natural Way of Things

by Charlotte Wood

'Oh, sweetie. You need to know what you are.'

Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of nowhere. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there with eight other girls, forced to wear strange uniforms, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious armed jailers and a 'nurse'.

The prisoners soon learn what links them: in each girl's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man... more

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The Landing

by Susan Johnson

Jonathan Lott is confused. His wife has left him for a woman and he doesn't like living alone. Is it true that an about-to-be-divorced man in possession of a good fortune is in need of a new wife?

Susan Johnson's stunning new novel, written with her trademark wit and insight, brilliantly observes what it is to be human and to love: the betrayals, the long and the short alliances, the disappointments and the joys. The Landing celebrates all of it with verve and style.

There's a lot happening at The Landing, where Jonathan has his beach house, and he's about to find out how much love matters... more

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The Golden Age

by Joan London

Winner of the 2015 Prime Minister's Literary Award

It is 1954 and thirteen-year-old Frank Gold, refugee from wartime Hungary, is learning to walk again after contracting polio in Australia. At the Golden Age Children's Polio Convalescent Home in Perth, he sees Elsa, a fellow patient, and they form a forbidden, passionate bond. The Golden Age becomes the little world that reflects the larger one, where everything occurs: love and desire, music, death, and poetry. It is a place where children must learn they're alone, even within their families.

Subtle, moving and remarkably lovely, The Golden Age evokes a time past and a yearning for deep connection, from one of Australia's finest and most-loved novelists...... more

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The Women's Pages

by Debra Adelaide

The Women's Pages is about the choices and compromises women make, about their griefs and losses, and about the cold aching spaces that are left when they disappear from the story.

Dove is writing a novel for herself, for her mother and for their literary heroines. It describes the life of Ellis, an ordinary young woman of the 1960s troubled by secrets and gaps in her past.

Having read Wuthering Heights to her dying mother, Dove finds she cannot shake off the influence of that singular novel: it has infected her like a disease. In grief's aftermath, she follows the story Wuthering Heights has inspired to discover more about Ellis, who has emerged from the pages of fiction herself - or has she? - to become a modern successful career woman...... more