Fiction

A father’s obsession. A daughter’s quest.

Eliza Grayling, born in Sydney when the colony itself was still an infant, has lived there all her thirty-two years. Too tall, too stern—too old, now—for marriage, she looks out for her reclusive father, Joshua, and...Read more

Strange things are happening at the Grand Hotel...

A hotel as a work of art in little ol' Mangowak? It was about as unlikely as an indoor creek.'

Robbed of his zest for life by the absurd innovations of his local council, including knocking down the only pub in his...Read more

The residents and neighbors of 44 Scotland Street and the city of Edinburgh come to vivid life in these gently satirical, wonderfully perceptive serial novels, featuring six-year-old Bertie, a remarkably precocious boy—just ask his mother.  

Welcome to 44...Read more

An Ideal Husband is an 1895 stage play by Oscar Wilde that revolves around blackmail and political corruption, and touches on the themes of public and private honour. The action is set in London, in the present, and takes place over the course of twenty four hours.
Sooner or later...Read more

When Kelvin returns to his childhood home on the southern coast of New South Wales, he discovers the town is a haven for people like him who are on the run from their pasts. He meets Jessica, a lawyer who has escaped the city, and Carl, an enigmatic American farmer. Both are pursuing new...Read more

Kate Kelly grew up in a house of women: when the Kelly men were not in jail, they were outlaws. Kate's loyalty to her family becomes a bitter obsession: 'They were bent on destroying us - like a nest of rats the farmer comes on with his plough - not caring that they hurt women and children...Read more

An irreverent comic adventure that spans three continents, A FRACTION OF THE WHOLE is the story of a father and son who are against each other and against the world. As Jasper Dean struggles to make sense of his certifiably paranoid father Martin, he discovers the outrageous truth about his...Read more

The Promise, winner of the 2021 Booker Prize, charts the crash and burn of a white South African family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The Swarts are gathering for Ma's funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for -- not least the...Read more

Set in Dublin during the Lockout of 1913, Strumpet City is a panoramic novel of city life. It embraces a wide range of social milieux, from the miseries of the tenements to the cultivated, bourgeois Bradshaws. It introduces a memorable cast of characters: the main protagonist, Fitz, a model...Read more

A whole community deported across Soviet Russia, a rice farmer and his wife separated through time, a young art student searching for her identity and for love . . .

Is all love doomed under a heartless regime?

Antonina is a student at the prestigious Academy of...Read more

Completed barely two months before her death, Pym's last novel is an incisive and wry portrait of life in an English village in Oxfordshire. It is also certain to be considered by many her masterwork. In A Few Green Leaves the author combines the rural setting of her earliest novels with...Read more

At the height of the Great Depression, with farmers walking off the land and the city's creeks lined with kerosene-tin shanties, a young mother is taken by a shark in the shallows at Henley Beach. Her grieving husband flees north with his baby son to the town of Pandowie, far from the...Read more

Primarily a gripping story of the men and women swept up by the passions of love and battle, William Boyd's magnificently entertaining novel also elicits the cruel futility and tragedy of it all.Read more

Torn was a pretty average sort of kid, as far as kids go, but as he grabbed his lucky red cap, flew up the stairs two at a time, and scoffed his pancakes that morning, he had absolutely no idea of how un-average his day was going to be. His Mom was taking him to see someone who, for Torn,...Read more