Grand Days

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	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

Xavier Herbert

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

Kenneth Cook

Filmed as The Outback

The Film Ink series presents the novels that inspired the work of some of the most celebrated directors of our time. While each novel is first and foremost a classic in its own right, these books offer the dedicated cinephile a richer understanding of the most illustrious...

Author	Alex Miller
ISBN	0340766913

Betrayed by her husband, Annabelle Beck retreats from Melbourne to her old family home in tropical North Queensland where she meets Bo Rennie, one of the Jangga tribe. Intrigued by Bo's claim that he holds the key to her future, Annabelle sets out with him on a path of recovery that leads back to her childhood...

Author	David Malouf
ISBN	0099273861

Every city, town and village has its memorial to war. Nowhere are these more eloquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles - from Gallipoli and the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. In THE GREAT WORLD, his finest novel yet, David Malouf gives a voice...

Author	Henry Handel Richardson
ISBN	0848259637

Set in Australia during the gold-mining boom, this remarkable trilogy is one of the classics of Australian literature.
Henry Handel Richardson’s great literary achievement, comprising the novels Australia Felix, The Way Home and Ultima Thule, weaves together many themes. Richard Mahony,...

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

Frank J. Hardy

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	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...

Author	Nick Earls
ISBN	0330355333

Richard Derrington's doing it tough.

Since Anna trashed him his job seems pointles, Tuesday seems moderately fucked by ten, his tennis appalling.....long periods of complete crap, punctuated by flashes of very random glory and the future bleka.

This is a hiatus? There I was thinking...

Author

Christina Stead

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	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...

Author	Malcolm Knox
ISBN	1742375359

"He looked into the Pacific and the Pacific looked back into him."
The Life tells the story of former-world-champion Australian surfer, Dennis Keith, from inside the very heart of the fame and madness that is 'The Life'.
Now bloated and paranoid, former Australian surfing legend Dennis Keith...

Author	Ceridwen Dovey
ISBN	0374226644

Celebrated by The New York Times as “a gifted prose stylist,” Ceridwen Dovey returns with a startling tale of obsession, control, and identity

Almost twenty years after forbidding him to contact her, Vita receives a letter from a man who has long stalked her from a distance. Once, Royce...

Author	Peter Goldsworthy
ISBN	0207197741

Peter Goldsworthy’s Darwin. In Maestro, the setting, vibrantly alive, is a character in its own right.

Darwin circa 1967 may seem an unlikely place for literary inspiration, but Peter Goldsworthy’s, Maestro, with its exotic setting and the emotions he attaches to it, is an irresistible...

Author	Kate Grenville
ISBN	0330341227

What a wonderful portrayal of an absolutely awful man.

Albion Gidley Singer is a monster of a man, who puts down everyone around him, and in particular the women in his life - his mother, his wife, his female work colleagues and of course his daughter, who in his eyes can do not good. His obsession...