Born into This by Adam Thompson

$29.99 AUD

Category: New Australian Fiction

The stories in Born Into This throw light on a world of unique cultural practice and perspective, from Indigenous rangers trying to instil some pride in wayward urban teens on the harsh islands off the coast of Tasmania, to those scraping by on the margins of white society railroaded into complex and co mpromised decisions. To this mix Adam Thompson manages to bring humour, pathos and occasionally a sly twist as his characters confront racism, untimely funerals, classroom politics and, overhanging all like a discomforting, burgeoning awareness for both white and black Australia, the inexorable damage and disappearance of the remnant natural world. ...Show more

Repentance by Alison Gibbs

$32.99 AUD

Category: New Australian Fiction

It's the summer of 1976, and the winds of change are blowing through the small town of Repentance on the edge of the Great Dividing Range. The old families cut timber, but the new settlers have a different perspective on the natural order and humankind's place in the scheme of things. Linda Curtis is t he latest blow-in to the old Parmenter farm, where the hippies have gathered and a protest is being planned. She's new to the district, but she shares a past with the protestors' militant leader. Yet not all their secrets are shared. From behind the counter of her father's shop, thirteen-year-old Joanne Parmenter struggles to make sense of what's happening to her town. Assigned to work on a local-history project with one of the hippie kids, she has chosen to avoid anything contentious and research the dying dairy industry, while her mother succumbs to cancer in the house behind her. Sandy Mitchell runs the sawmill that employs half the town. His son and heir is being lured to the city, and his first grandchild is on the way. In the story he learnt as a boy and has never sought to question, he now finds himself cast as the bad man. The bush keeps its own rhythms, but soon everything will be disturbed. Either the old growth is coming down or the loggers have to be stopped. And although not everyone agrees on tactics, no one will escape being drawn into the coming confrontation.   ...Show more

A Room Called Earth by Madeleine Ryan

$29.99 AUD

Category: Australian Fiction

A young woman gets ready to go to a party. She arrives, feels overwhelmed, leaves, and then returns. Minutely attuned to the people who come into her view, and alternating between alienation and profound connection, she is hilarious, self-aware, sometimes acerbic, and painfully honest. And by the end o f the night, she's shown us something radical about love, loss, and the need to belong. ...Show more

The Lady with the Gun Asks the Questions by Kerry Greenwood

$29.99 AUD

Category: New Australian Fiction

The elegant Miss Phryne Fisher returns in this scintillating collection, which features four brand-new stories. The Honourable Phryne Fisher - she of the Lulu bob, Cupid's bow lips, diamante garters and pearl-handled pistol - is the 1920s' most elegant and irrepressible sleuth.Miss Phryne Fisher is up to her stunning green eyes in intriguing crime in each of these entertaining, fun and compulsively readable stories. With the ever-loyal Dot, the ingenious Mr Butler and all of Phryne's friends and household, the action is as fast as Phryne's wit and logic.   ...Show more

Curiouser Magazine (Issue #1) by Thomas Bailey (editor)

$24.99 AUD

Category: New Australian Fiction

From Where I Fell by Susan Johnson

$32.99 AUD

Category: Australian Fiction

 'Two deep, bright, razor-sharp women at opposite ends of the earth tearing the band-aids off their souls, exposing truths and lies buried beneath marriage, motherhood and the sacrificial siege of mid-to-late-life maintenance. This is Susan Johnson at her most original, daring, bone-deep and deliciously raw. I fell, too, with aching heart and tickled rib, under the spell of this extraordinary book.' TRENT DALTON 'In a strikingly original reimagining of an epistolary novel, Susan Johnson creates two voices that echo and reverberate long after the final, heart-wrenching pages. Her best yet.' GERALDINE BROOKS An anguished email from Pamela Robinson in Australia to her ex-husband in Paris accidentally ends up in the inbox of New York State teacher Chrisanthi Woods. Chrisanthi is sympathetic to Pamela's struggles and the women begin to tell each other the stories and secrets of their lives. Pamela, responsible for raising her three sons, must re-invent the meaning of home following her divorce, and Chrisanthi, her dreams long dampened, must find home by leaving it. Temperamental opposites, their emails turn into an exhilarating and provocative exchange of love, loss and fresh beginnings, by turns amusing, frank and confronting. 'Witty, warm, heartbreaking and honest - an audacious masterpiece from one of Australia's best writers.' NIKKI GEMMELL 'Few novelists working today can match Susan Johnson's uncanny ability to map both the joys and horrors of the human heart and to wrestle the ebb and flow of life to the page. From Where I Fell teems with regret, eruptions of joy, the complexities of motherhood, the power of memory, the pain of divorce and dashed and gained dreams.' MATTHEW CONDON    ...Show more

Hold Your Fire by Chloe Wilson

$32.99 AUD

Category: Books by Neighbours

Dark and dangerous, brilliantly unsettling and chillingly funny, this extraordinary debut shows us what we usually deny - the uneasy truce we make with our ruthless desires and gothic fears, and how easily it can be broken. Prize-winning author Chloe Wilson's stories will pin you to the page. 'Chilling , funny, and razor sharp - a writer in control every step of the way. How I relished this extraordinary and original collection.' Sofie Laguna, Miles Franklin winner for The Eye of the Sheep First published in Granta Magazine, the title story takes us into the cold war of a contemporary family: a missile-making mother doubts her husband's guts and the steel of her son, until a playground incident escalates and brings them into the most surprising of alliances. Needle sharp, effortlessly surprising and beautifully controlled, every story is transfixing. A young couple move into a house in which there's been a recent murder, and fall under the spell of their peculiar, commanding neighbours. Two sisters are determined to detoxify themselves into perfection. A diver pushes herself and those around her to higher and higher jumps.  Interspersed with these transfixing tales are lightning strikes of flash fiction: we glimpse a leopard in the apartment next door; plants grown out of a strange and miraculous soil; the spirit of a girl who's been thrown down a well. At each turn, Chloe Wilson offers a unique insight, a tear in the veil of our comfortable moral certainties. Hold Your Fire exposes the battles we wage beneath the surface. '['Tongue-Tied'] had me uncomfortably pinned by the end of the first paragraph, and squirming by the end of the first page ... add to that delicate balance an unusual point of view, two loaded relationships, and a sharp, subtle dose of humour, and I had to pick this story.' Rebecca Makkai, in choosing 'Tongue-Tied' to win the Iowa Review Prize. 'The stories in Chloe Wilson's Hold Your Fire are full of wit, intelligence, savage humour, and dark surprises. They combine the brilliant menace of Ottessa Mossfegh with the insight and control of Helen Garner; the result is a new Australian writer who made me feel less like a reader and more like a conspirator. I was transfixed.' Fiona McFarlane, author of Miles Franklin-shortlisted The Night Guest and The High Places 'These stories are wonderfully strange, complex yet funny; they are otherworldly and unearthly but at the same time an expression of how we live in the world right now. Chloe Wilson is the magician who by her art brings to light all we usually prefer to keep hidden.' Ceridwen Dovey, author of Only the Animals and In the Garden of the Fugitives   ...Show more

Speechwriter by Martin McKenzie-Murray

$29.99 AUD

Category: New Australian Fiction

Toby, former speechwriter to the PM, has reached a new low: locked behind bars in a high-security prison, with sentient PlayStations storming the city outside, and the worst of Australia's criminals forcing him to ghost-write letters to their loved ones or have his spine repurposed as a coat-rack. How d id he get here? From the vantage point of his prison cell, Toby pens his memoir, trying to piece together how he fell so far, all the while fielding the uninvited literary opinions of his murderous cellmate, Gary. What Toby unspools is a tale of twisted bureaucracy, public servants gone rogue, and the ever-present pervasive stench of rotting prawns (don't ask). Realising that his political career is far from the noble endeavour he'd once imagined it would be, Toby makes a bid for freedom ... before the terrible realisation dawns: it's impossible to get fired from the public service. Refusing to give up (or have to pay for his relocation fee), Toby's attempts to get fired grow more and more extreme, and he finds himself being propelled higher and higher through the ranks of bureaucracy. ...Show more

The Silent Listener by Lyn Yeowart

$32.99 AUD

Category: New Australian Fiction

Propelling the reader back and forth between the 1940s, 1960s and 1980s, The Silent Listener is an unforgettable literary suspense novel set in the dark, gothic heart of rural Australia. In the cold, wet summer of 1960, 11-year-old Joy Henderson lives in constant fear of her father. She tries to make him happy but, as he keeps reminding her, she is nothing but a filthy sinner destined for Hell . . . Yet, decades later, she returns to the family's farm to nurse him on his death bed. To her surprise, her 'perfect' sister Ruth is also there, whispering dark words, urging revenge. Then the day after their father finally confesses to a despicable crime, Joy finds him dead - with a belt pulled tight around his neck . . . For Senior Constable Alex Shepherd, investigating George's murder revives memories of an unsolved case still haunting him since that strange summer of 1960- the disappearance of nine-year-old Wendy Boscombe. As seemingly impossible facts surface about the Hendersons - from the past and the present - Shepherd suspects that Joy is pulling him into an intricate web of lies and that Wendy's disappearance is the key to the bizarre truth. ...Show more

Everyday Madness by Susan Midalia

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

Life sucks when you are a vacuum cleaner-salesman facing redundancy, and your wife of nearly forty years fills your days and nights with incessant chatter. But when Gloria suddenly and alarmingly stops talking, the silence is more than fifty-nine-year-old Bernard can bear. In desperation, Bernard turns to his ex-daughter-in-law for help. Meg has issues of her own, and her bright and funny daughter Ella sometimes wonders if her mum is trying so hard to keep her safe it stops them both from spreading their wings. Will Meg's suspicious nature thwart her chance encounter with the kindly but engimatic Hal? And is there still hope for Bernard and Gloria on the other side of silence? ...Show more

Love Objects by Emily Maguire

$32.99 AUD

Category: New Australian Fiction

Nic is a forty-five-year-old trivia buff, amateur nail artist and fairy godmother to the neighbourhood's stray cats. She's also the owner of a decade's worth of daily newspapers, enough clothes and shoes to fill Big W three times over and a pen collection which, if laid end-to-end, would probably circle her house twice. The person she's closest to in the world is her beloved niece Lena, who she meets for lunch every Sunday. One day Nic fails to show up. When Lena travels to her aunt's house to see if Nic's all right, she gets the shock of her life, and sets in train a series of events that will prove cataclysmic for them both. By the acclaimed author of An Isolated Incident, Love Objects is a clear-eyed, heart-wrenching and deeply compassionate novel about love and family, betrayal and forgiveness, and the things we do to fill our empty spaces. ...Show more

Spiral by Iain Ryan

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

It's not just the truth that lurks at the bottom of the spiral...the utterly original and brilliantly compelling new thriller by the twice Ned Kelly Award shortlisted Iain Ryan. Erma Bridges' life is far from perfect, but entirely ordinary. So when she is shot twice in a targeted attack by a colleague, her quiet existence is shattered in an instant.With her would-be murderer dead, no one can give Erma the answers she needs to move on from her trauma. Why her? Why now?So begins Erma's quest for the truth - and a dangerous, spiralling journey into the heart of darkness.With all the inventiveness of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and the raw brutality of Mulholland Drive, THE SPIRAL is a unique crime thriller with killer twists - and 2020's most jaw-dropping ending. ...Show more