Hauntingly beautiful and told with an elegant simplicity, this is the story of two brothers growing up in a fractured family on the wild Tasmanian coast. [click to continue…]
Adult Fiction
When Mary Lanyon takes on the job of temporary housekeeper at Downe, a famous Merino stud, she is looking forward to staying in a gracious homestead with the wealthy Hazlitt family. The owner’s wife, Clio, has been ill, and Mary’s task is to get the house back into shape in the lead-up to the wedding of the only son and heir, Martin. [click to continue…]
On a radiant day in Sydney, four adults converge on Circular Quay, site of the iconic Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Crowds of tourists mix with the locals, enjoying the glorious surroundings and the play of light on water.
But each of the four carries a complicated history from elsewhere; each is haunted by past intimacies, secrets and guilt: Ellie is preoccupied by her sexual experiences as a girl, James by a tragedy for which he feels responsible, Catherine by the loss of her beloved brother in Dublin and Pei Xing by her imprisonment during China’s Cultural Revolution. [click to continue…]
A daring heroine tests her wits against secrets, spies and smugglers on a remote Australian island. [click to continue…]
Art expert Davenport Jones has moved into the heady world of the international art market in London and now works as a senior executive in the old and established firm of Londy’s. The novel is a hilarious account of Davenport’s passage through his world and his pursuit of a cache of valuable avant-garde paintings by a reclusive Russian master in St Petersburg. [click to continue…]
In Poor Fellow My Country, Xavier Herbert has returned to that region made peculiarly his own in Capricornia, Northern Australia. Ranging over a period of some six years, the story is set during the late 1930s and early 1940s; but it is not so much a tale of this period as Herbert’s analysis (and indictment) of the steps by which we came to the Australia of today.
Sensational rumours of the murder of three small children by their stepmother ignite the passions of Perth citizens in 1909. Shocked by horrific descriptions of how she poisoned the children, they demand her execution as one voice. [click to continue…]
Francis Sprigge and Lilian Powys, two strangers escaping their past, move to the Blue Mountains together, following their dreams of creativity and love. But as Francis pursues his gift for designing exquisite wallpaper, Lilian finds that the ordinary life she craves remains frustratingly beyond reach. Despite her adoring husband and spirited young daughter Adelaide, Lilian cannot outrun her demons, and cracks soon appear in the family’s harmonious veneer. [click to continue…]
It’s not easy being Death. For starters, people keep dying. And then, they keep getting up again.
Steven de Selby got promoted. This makes the increasing number of stirrers (and the disturbing rumors of a zombie god rising sometime soon) his problem. [click to continue…]
Hal Challis is in trouble at home and abroad: carpeted by the boss for speaking out about police budget cuts; missing his lover, Ellen Destry, who is overseas on a study tour.
But there’s plenty to keep his mind off his problems. A rapist in a police uniform stalks Challis’s Peninsula beat, there is a serial armed robber headed in his direction and a home invasion that’s a little too close to home. [click to continue…]
