Книги

Tokyo, 1933. Tall, broodingly handsome, Victor Stepper is a consummate ladies' man, a brilliant journalist... and spy. As the world descends into war, Stepper collects information and sends it on to Moscow.

Then he falls in love with Reiko, a Japanese woman. And Victor Stepper begins to fall apart...

Stepper is a dazzling and haunting novel of espionage and erotic love.

Tokyo, 1933. Tall, broodingly handsome, Victor Stepper is a consummate ladies' man, a brilliant journalist... and spy. As the world descends into war, Stepper collects information…

In Billy Sunday, his second novel published in the United States, Jones turns his ambitious imagination to the American psyche at the end of the frontier period. Three historical figures stand at center stage: Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the famous book of essays The Frontier in American History; Charles Van Schaick, the photographer Michael Lesy made famous in his surreal and haunting book Wisconsin Death Trip; and Billy Sunday himself, an orphan, undertaker's assistant, and onetime professional baseball player who became a charismatic evangelist in the 1890s. Their paths cross during the steamy summer of 1892, when a girl's body is discovered in the woods beside a dreamy lake on the very edge of civilization. This terrible moment becomes the fulcrum for Jones's compelling and tragic meditation on the end of an era, as well as of an ethos, in our history.

In Billy Sunday, his second novel published in the United States, Jones turns his ambitious imagination to the American psyche at the end of the frontier period. Three historical…

'It isn't a repetition,' Mr George says when I meet him at the station, 'It isn't a repetition, is it, of that fellow Metcalf? This isn't the same sort of thing is it?' Mr George has come all the way from Scotland to the Midlands to ask me this question...I tell him of course it is different. I am older now...I am a doctor now and in my first resident appointment. I remind him that I am the mother of two daughters and that, above all, I belong to him, Mr George.

Vera and Mr George have made a new life together but Vera's thoughts return again and again to loves and lovers, meetings and partings, the voices that echo in the mind like music.

What has she learned from the well-bred peace of the Georges' household; the decadence and disorder of her friendship with Noel and Felicity; the fun and vulgarity shared with her 'widow' on the long voyage to Australia? Must she always repeat the past?

As in My Father's Moon and Cabin Fever Elizabeth Jolley returns to the themes of discord and harmony between brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, friends and lovers. Her spare and sensitive prose is illuminated with compassion and understanding for the intricacies of human relationships.

'It isn't a repetition,' Mr George says when I meet him at the station, 'It isn't a repetition, is it, of that fellow Metcalf? This isn't the same sort of thing is it?' Mr George…

Christina Stead was a hugely unapproachable person who detested self-revelation and, late in life, destroyed many of her private papers. Would-be biographers were held at arm's length, and any so foolhardy as to persevere found doors slammed and projects aborted. Only Hazel Rowley managed to stay the course, persuading Stead's estate as well as her friends, colleagues, and family members to cooperate, thereby gaining access to private papers and privileged memories. The result is an intellectually rigorous yet dramatically riveting book that brings alive this odd and furious woman who was often her own worst enemy but who stands with very few as one of the truly important literary figures of her age. Born in Australia in 1902, Christina Stead sailed for England at the age of twenty-six, not to return home until she was seventy-two. An intensely private person and an incredibly cantankerous one, Stead lived a life that was stormy, eccentric, and brave. She was highly political and maddeningly contentious - few would call her easy in life or in fiction. And yet, in her lifetime, her work was likened to that of Balzac, Joyce, Ibsen, and Tolstoy. But, in fact, it was uniquely her own.

Christina Stead was a hugely unapproachable person who detested self-revelation and, late in life, destroyed many of her private papers. Would-be biographers were held at arm's…

The French corvette l'Astrolabe sails into Westernport, the scientists on board intent on drawing, recording, classifying. A century later Anna and Jasper Black, pioneering believers in the notion of progress, come to test their belief that the land can be made to serve their purposes. Now landscape photographer Jack Cameron, lost, drifting, struggles with their past to find a purpose his own life lacks. This bold and impressive novel interweaves narrative strands from past and present to create a world that is familiar yet disturbingly strange. Landscape becomes an obsession, photographs throw up unsettling images distilled from the past, reality and imagination begin to shift...

The French corvette l'Astrolabe sails into Westernport, the scientists on board intent on drawing, recording, classifying. A century later Anna and Jasper Black, pioneering…

Another shed coming up on the horizon...a low, wide roof of galvanised iron the only landmark in a million square miles of flatness and glare... The sun blazed overhead like a nuclear pile. His hat smelt like a dirty sock. His body was sticky, itchy, tired. The tyres of his old yellow truck, sunk into the sand, gave out a hot, desolate, perished rubber odour, heatwaves ballooning from the bodywork. The impression he had, glancing back towards the vehicle, was of disintegrating material only just holding together. A split in his hat admitted a hot bar of sunlight onto his scalp. His eyeballs felt like pinpoint charred coals and he wanted to slide down into what shade there was...

Yesterday morning he had left a tin-roofed farmhouse far to the south of here - Sharon, his wife, and his three daughters hardly stirring in their sleep as they said goodbye. Then while he was out at the truck tying down the last of his load they woke up more, stumbled from bed and huddled in jumpers, stamping their feet in the chill, hugging themselves in the greyness of first light. Sharon brought him a mug of tea and they stood looking at each other over the steaming rims. Well, there was more to this going away than met the eye. The talk of money. The talk of returning to the country of his childhood. It wasn't the full story...

He took the cool, pre-autumnal, misty dawn track away - across sheep paddocks dotted with poplars. In a ground mist a flock of starlings formed a perfect heart collapsing into the tatters of a pine windbreak. It was a reversed image of emotion. He was leaving a house, making a break, following a pattern he barely understood. He only knew it was happening; that he was making it happen, and was going, and if he didn't there was a kind of death he would face, he couldn't name what it was.

Into the hard-living world of travelling shearers in the Australian outback comes internationally acclaimed writer Roger McDonald, driving an old truck rattling with cooking gear. He has abandoned writing for a time and found work as a cook for a team of New Zealand shearers working through New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria. He is determined to find a sense of belonging: somehow to join his life with the landscape, the places and the people he meets along the way; somehow to fill the inexpressible yearning he feels.

Shearers' Motel is the story of that quest, of its triumphs and its failures - a story told with a heartfelt sense of of the profundity of ordinary lives. Written with an insider's affection and familiarity sharpened by an outsider's perception, this moving account of working life in a classic Australian industry gives a new twist to a long tradition of outback travel writing. It confirms Roger McDonald as one of our finest and most lyrical chroniclers of the land - and of the human heart.

Another shed coming up on the horizon...a low, wide roof of galvanised iron the only landmark in a million square miles of flatness and glare... The sun blazed overhead like a…

Two rural families - the Pickles and the Lambs - flee to the city after separate catastrophes. They find themselves sharing a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet, where they begin their lives again from scratch - and for twenty years, they roister and rankle, laugh and curse until the roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.

Tim Winton’s funny, sprawling saga is an epic novel of love and acceptance. It is a celebration of people, places and rhythms of life that has become one of Australia’s favourite novels.

Two rural families - the Pickles and the Lambs - flee to the city after separate catastrophes. They find themselves sharing a great, breathing, shuddering joint called…

'Totally convincing and enjoyable ... [Adams] can sketch characters in a dialogue or two, extract entertainment from ordinary situations, and she captures the mood of suburban Australia.' Sunday Times 'It took William Badger some time to understand that he was going to be left behind, deliberately abandoned, what seemed like a thousand miles from home. His mother had simply asked if he would like a nice seaside holiday, and he had said yes.' When William Badger is ten years old his mother Rose takes him to a boarding house in Manly - Seven Miles from Sydney, and a Thousand Miles from Care. Left there, abandoned by the glorious Rose, who once danced and twirled on her little pointy shoes, William sits in the hedge and waits for her return. But the Rose he longs for never returns; the mother who comes back is much too angry to twirl. The only clue William has to this bewildering change is the name on a document he sees in the dining room sideboard: Longleg, the perfect name for an imaginary friend, or an alter ego... In this imaginative tour de force, Miles Franklin award winner Glenda Adams explores with tenderness and grace the life of a man who seems destined to find his mother in all other women. Winner of the National Book Council Banjo Award. Winner of The Age Fiction Book of the Year Award. 'A wise and gentle story of a boy growing up and discovering himself and the world. Adams makes the ordinary extraordinary, and her affection for her characters shines out.' The Australian

'Totally convincing and enjoyable ... [Adams] can sketch characters in a dialogue or two, extract entertainment from ordinary situations, and she captures the mood of suburban…

In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey's uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character—espcially of its proclivity for tall stories and barefaced lies.

As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters, with characters that include a genteel dowager who fends off madness with an electric belt and a ravishing young girl with a dangerous fondness for rooftop trysts. Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd, Illywhacker is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere.

In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter…

This novel, by the author of Oscar and Lucinda, tells the story of a man who, recovering from death, is convinced that he is in hell. For the first time in his life, Harry Joy sees the world as it really is, and takes up a notebook to explore and notate the true nature of the Underworld.

This novel, by the author of Oscar and Lucinda, tells the story of a man who, recovering from death, is convinced that he is in hell. For the first time in his life, Harry Joy…

From the most remote and only pagan British Isle comes Moonlite MacDuffie, a physical and intellectual oddity, whose mathematical and lay preaching talents combine to gain him admission to Jesus College, Newbridge, and then on am emigrant ship for the New West Highlands.

Moonlite is a multifarious, downbeat tragi-comedy, without the muffled crepe of philosophical despair. It deliberately breaks the illusions it creates, but preserves its images within a stylistically complex layering of scientific, religious and occult speculation. Moonlite is a farce in four acts, a story of extraordinary originality and power, a lamentation for lost innocence, and in the limit, a larrikin allegory of Colonial consciousness.

From the most remote and only pagan British Isle comes Moonlite MacDuffie, a physical and intellectual oddity, whose mathematical and lay preaching talents combine to gain him…

Albert Barnett Facey was born in 1894 in Maidstone, Victoria & grew up on the Kalgoorlie goldfields & in the wheat-belt of Western Australia. His father died before he was two. He was deserted by his mother soon afterwards. He was looked after by his grandmother until he was eight, when he went out to work. His many jobs included droving, hammering spikes on the railway line from Merredin to Wickepin & boxing in a travelling troupe.
He was in the 11th Battalion at the Gallipoli landing. After the war, he became a farmer under the Soldier Settlement Scheme but was forced off the land during the Depression. He joined the tramways & was active in the Tramways Union. Having no formal education, he taught himself to read & write. He made the first notes of his life soon after WWI, filling notebooks with accounts of his experiences. Finally, on his children's urging, he submitted a hand-written manuscript to the Fremantle Arts Centre Press. He died in 1982, nine months after A Fortunate Life had been published to wide acclaim.
"I have lived a very good life, it has been very rich & full. I have been very fortunate & I am thrilled by it when I look back."--A.B. Facey

Albert Barnett Facey was born in 1894 in Maidstone, Victoria & grew up on the Kalgoorlie goldfields & in the wheat-belt of Western Australia. His father died before he was two. He…

Inner-suburban Melbourne in the 1970s: a world of communal living, drugs, music and love. Nora falls in love with Javo the junkie, and together they try to make sense of their lives and the choices they have made.

But caught in an increasingly ambiguous relationship, they are unable to let go and the harder they pull away from each other, the tighter the monkey grip.

Inner-suburban Melbourne in the 1970s: a world of communal living, drugs, music and love. Nora falls in love with Javo the junkie, and together they try to make sense of their…

Kevin Gilbert's ground-breaking book includes interviews with several members of the Aboriginal community including Robert Jabanungga reflecting on contemporary Aboriginal culture.

Based on the author's experience in the Australian Army, The Odd Angry Shot is the seminal account of Australian soldiers in the Vietnam War: brief and bracing, tragic yet darkly funny.

This classic Australian novel won Australia's National Book Council Award and became an iconic film.

Based on the author's experience in the Australian Army, The Odd Angry Shot is the seminal account of Australian soldiers in the Vietnam War: brief and bracing, tragic yet darkly…