Fortunes of Richard Mahony
10 best books like Fortunes of Richard Mahony (Henry Handel Richardson): Carpentaria, My Brother Jack, The Tree Of Man, Grand Days, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, For the Term of His Natural Life, Capricornia, Manservant and Maidservant, The Timeless Land, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
| Author | Alexis Wright |
| ISBN | 1920882176 |
Hailed as a "literary sensation" by The New York Times Book Review, Carpentaria is the luminous award-winning novel by Australian Aboriginal writer and activist Alexis Wright.
Alexis Wright employs mysticism, stark reality, and pointed imagination to re-create the land and the Aboriginal...
| Author | George Johnston |
| ISBN | 0207187320 |
3.5 stars
It was only after I finished reading My Brother Jack by George Johnston that I discovered it had been the winner of the 1964 Miles Franklin award. To win, novels must be of the highest literary merit and present Australian life in any of its phases There is no question in my mind that this was...
| Author | Patrick White |
| ISBN | 0099324512 |
Patrick White’s style is a unique blend of roughness and literacy that can become quite absorbing, mesmerizing even, for its timelessness. The minor details of ordinary lives fuse with poetic vision and transform the common experience of man into the absolute essence that holds the power to make...
| Author | Frank Moorhouse |
| ISBN | 1740510372 |
A contemporary romantic Australian masterpiece, Grand Days tells of the moral and sexual awakening of an idealistic young Australian woman working in the diplomatic corps in Europe in the aftermath of World War I.
On a train from Paris to Geneva, Edith Campbell Berry meets Major Ambrose Westwood...
| Author | Thomas Keneally |
| ISBN | 0207197164 |
The extraordinary Booker Prize shortlisted story of a black man's revenge against an unjust and intolerant society. Thomas Keneally was born in Sydney Australia in 1935. He studied to be a Catholic priest but abandoned his vocation to take up teaching and writing. He is the author of numerous works...
| Author | Marcus Clarke |
| ISBN | 1406512036 |
“We convicts have the advantage over you gentlemen. You are afraid of death; we pray for it. It is the best thing that can happen to us. Die! They were going to hang me once. I wish they had. My God, I wish they had!”
For The Term Of His Natural Life is the best-known novel by Australian author,...
I first read Capricornia by Xavier Herbert (1901-1984) more than 30 years ago when I was majoring in English and was astonished at the scope and daring of the story. It’s a powerful exposé of race relations in Australia, delivered palatably in the form of a most engaging story. When I saw it in Dymocks...
| Author | Ivy Compton-Burnett |
| ISBN | 0940322633 |
At once the strangest and most marvelous of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fictions, Manservant and Maidservant has for its subject the domestic life of Horace Lamb, sadist, skinflint, and tyrant. But it is when Horace undergoes an altogether unforeseeable change of heart that the real difficulties begin....
| Author | Eleanor Dark |
| ISBN | 0006160166 |
4.5★ (Read Sept 2018)
“The hardly endurable heat of the day had culminated again in a storm, and even to a less lively imagination than Tench’s it might have seemed that all the evil of earth and heaven was let loose, and some reckless spirit of self-destruction in the settlement lifting itself...
| Author | Randolph Stow |
| ISBN | 0140028358 |
Do not think less of anyone for hating this if they had to read it in high school. I had to as well and I despised this book. I actually grew up in Geraldton in the 70s and 80s and it seemed as though not much had changed since the 40s, excpept mabe for the war. Hated hated hated it. Trying to explain to some first...
| Author | Watkin Tench |
| ISBN | 1875847278 |
Watkin Tench stepped ashore at Botany Bay with the First Fleet in January 1788. He was in his late twenties, a captain of the marines, and on the adventure of his life. Insatiably curious, with a natural genius for storytelling, Tench wrote two enthralling accounts of the infant colony - A Narrative of...
| Author | Geoffrey Blainey |
| ISBN | 0333338367 |
'One of the most illuminating books ever written on Australian history.' - The Bulletin
In "The Tyranny of Distance", an Australian classic that has been continuously in print since 1967, Geoffrey Blainey describes how distance and isolation have been central to Australia's history and...
| Author | Shane Maloney |
| ISBN | 1841955310 |
Murray Whelan thinks the everyday life of a political advisor is complicated enough: but now there are intimations of intrigue among the party powerful and his ex-wife is mounting a custody battle over his beloved son. So when you throw in a Turk snap-frozen in a local meat plant, drugs planted under...
| Author | Piers Paul Read |
| ISBN | 0380551039 |
John Strickland is a middle-aged barrister with a wife, Clare, and two children. Staying with his parents-in-law at their house in Norfolk, he reads Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Illych, and this precipitates a mid-life crisis. What has happened to his youthful ideals to do good in the...
Power Without Glory caused a sensation when it was released, leading to a famous court case. It is a thinly veiled description of the rise to power of real life figure John Wren (in the book 'John West').
Some other people alluded to in the book include Tommy Bent, Sir Samuel Gillott, the gangster...
| Author | Katharine Susannah Prichard |
| ISBN | 0207132178 |
Coonardoo is the moving story of a young Aboriginal woman trained form childhood to be the housekeeper at Wytaliba station and, as such, destined to look after its owner, Hugh Watt. The love between Coonardoo and Hugh, which so shocked its readers when the book was first published in 1929, is never acknowledged...
| Author | L.P. Hartley |
| ISBN | 0571203825 |
Oh, L.P. Hartley, why are you forgotten?
This is the second Hartley book I've read (the first was The Go-Between), and if anything this one was even better. Both of the books take a double view, with a main character seeing things from childhood and the reader having access to what the adult world...
| Author | Dorothy Porter |
| ISBN | 1852425490 |
Mickey is a sweet nineteen-year-old girl, who loves poetry and poets, but has just gone missing in suspicious circumstances. Private investigator Jill Fitzpatrick is hired to find her. In her search for the truth, in what becomes a murder hunt, Jill is seduced by the alluring Diana Mailand, Mickey's...
High-minded, independent, imaginative, Teresa Hawkins knows only one commandment: ‘Thou shalt love’. Emotionally starved by her ramshackle family, Teresa searches for fulfilment outside her stultifying life as a working girl in a large city. Obsessed with love and sex she pins her affection...
| Author | Donald Horne |
| ISBN | 0143180029 |
Pungent. Much of the analysis still applicable today 2015 with a conservative government in Canberra, a prime minister exhuming knighthoods on Australia Day. Is progress an illusion?
The chapter on Menzies, a valuable record for future reference.
The chapter 'Living with Asia'...
| Author | Dymphna Cusack |
| ISBN | 0207197563 |
The book opens with a stuck lift and an Aussie injured soldier working as a liftman playing a two-up game with some American soldiers (I had to look up this game myself, it’s to do with spinning/throwing coins). Hence, the title Come In Spinner. These soldiers themselves are not the main characters...
| Author | Thea Astley |
| ISBN | 0140121382 |
Like a deal of Astley's fiction, It's Raining in Mango is set in north Queensland, an inhospitable locale in many ways but one which the Laffey family of Mango find compelling and to which they are drawn back after their half-hearted forays into urban life. The book is written in the saga form, spanning...
