Книги

We Come with This Place is a remarkable book, as rich, varied and surprising as the vast landscape in which it is set. Debra Dank has created an extraordinary mosaic of vivid episodes that move about in time and place to tell an unforgettable story of country and people.

Dank calibrates human emotions with honesty and insight, and there is plenty of dry, down-to-earth humour. You can feel and smell and see the puffs of dust under moving feet, the ever-present burning heat, the bright exuberance of a night-time campfire, the emerald flash of a flock of budgerigars, the journeying wind, the harshness of a station shanty, the welcome scent of fresh water.

We Come with This Place is deeply personal, a profound tribute to family and the Gudanji Country to which Debra Dank belongs, but it is much more than that. Here is Australia as it has been for countless generations, land and people in effortless balance, and Australia as it became, but also Australia as it could and should be.

We Come with This Place is a remarkable book, as rich, varied and surprising as the vast landscape in which it is set. Debra Dank has created an extraordinary mosaic of vivid…

Who is Iris Webber?

A thief, a fighter, a wife, a lover.

A scammer, a schemer, a friend.

A musician, a worker, a big-hearted fool.

A woman who has prevailed against the toughest gangsters of the day, defying police time and again, yet is now trapped in a prison cell.

Guilty or innocent?

Rollicking through the underbelly of 1930s sly-grog Sydney, Iris is a dazzling literary achievement from one of Australia's finest writers. Based on actual events and set in an era of cataclysmic change, here is a fierce, fascinating tale of a woman who couldn't be held back.

Who is Iris Webber?

A thief, a fighter, a wife, a lover.

A scammer, a schemer, a friend.

A musician, a worker, a big-hearted fool.

A woman who has prevailed against…

In 1910 the famed escapologist Harry Houdini made an ill-fated attempt to become the first person to fly an aircraft over Australian soil—yet while Houdini is remembered today for his failure, the true record-holder has been forgotten. This quirk of history becomes the focus for the obsessions of Bernard Cripp, world-weary scion of an ailing family circus, who tries to unearth every detail of Houdini’s flight in order to re-enact it. But why is Bernard so single-minded? As his manic testimony unspools, his story takes on a darker tone: he is, in fact, in mourning for a wife and child he has lost to the skies, and paralysed by the uncertainty surrounding their deaths. If his efforts to re-create history cannot bring back his loved ones, can they at least bring him peace as he struggles to live with his loss?

In Waypoints, his outlandish début novel, Adam Ouston embarks on a journey to reclaim a lost sense of awe and wonder from subjects as diverse as Victorian vaudeville and cutting-edge data storage, from the early history of Alzheimer’s disease to the immortality of human consciousness. Blending the solemnity of Sebald with the breathlessness of Bernhard, the result is equal parts rambunctious and ruminative, poignant and hilarious — a wild ride through a storm of grief, ambition, integrity, remembrance, and love.

'Artful, terrific, heaps of fun... Adam Ouston is hugely talented.' – Robbie Arnott

In 1910 the famed escapologist Harry Houdini made an ill-fated attempt to become the first person to fly an aircraft over Australian soil—yet while Houdini is remembered today for…

From the 2020 winner of the Thomas Shapcott Award comes a sophisticated, impressive and rich collection of poetry that unpacks the complexity of family, grief, and cross-cultural and queer identity.

These richly allusive poems weigh violence and tenderness, wound and cure, history and future. Boldly and tenderly, they balance loss and gain, adventure and quiet, as they hum to one another of love and loss. This is a scintillating and exhilarating collection from an accomplished and distinctive new voice.

From the 2020 winner of the Thomas Shapcott Award comes a sophisticated, impressive and rich collection of poetry that unpacks the complexity of family, grief, and cross-cultural…

In the heat of a long summer Ned hunts rabbits in a river valley, hoping the pelts will earn him enough money to buy a small boat. His two brothers are away at war, their whereabouts unknown. His father and older sister struggle to hold things together on the family orchard, Limberlost. Desperate to ignore it all—to avoid the future rushing towards him—Ned dreams of open water. As his story unfolds over the following decades, we see how Ned’s choices that summer come to shape the course of his life, the fate of his family and the future of the valley, with its seasons of death and rebirth. The third novel by the award-winning author of Flames and The Rain Heron, Limberlost is an extraordinary chronicle of life and land: of carnage and kindness, blood ties and love.

In the heat of a long summer Ned hunts rabbits in a river valley, hoping the pelts will earn him enough money to buy a small boat. His two brothers are away at war, their…

A ground-breaking insight into the experience of disability, from a distinguished poet who has lived with Marfan Syndrome, including severe spinal curvature, and whose poems give voice to those who are often treated as ‘other’ or alien.

The poems are visceral and intimate, they comfort and discomfort at the same time – empathy for the other seems to falter, only to expand and deepen.

The poems in Human Looking speak with the voices of the disabled and the disfigured, in ways which are confronting, but also illuminating and tender. They speak of surgical interventions, and of the different kinds of disability which they seek to ‘correct’. They range widely, finding figures to identify with in mythology and history, art and photography, poetry and fiction. A number of poems deal with unsettling extremes of embodiment, and with violence against disabled people. Others emerge out of everyday life, and the effects of illness, pain and prejudice. The strength of the speaking voice is remarkable, as is its capacity for empathy and love. ‘I, this wonderful catastrophe’, the poet has Mary Shelley’s monstrous figure declare. The use of unusual and disjunctive – or ‘deformed’ – poetic forms, adds to the emotional impact of the poems.

A ground-breaking insight into the experience of disability, from a distinguished poet who has lived with Marfan Syndrome, including severe spinal curvature, and whose poems give…

A breathtaking new novel from the Stella Prize-winning author of The Strays.

In spring of 2011, a young Australian man travels to the USA.

It is a quest of sorts, a quest as old as narrative itself: a young man striking out from home in search of experience and culture, which he associates with that talismanic word, America.

Beginning in the excessive, uncanny-familiar glamour and plenitude of New York City, Will crashes with expat chef and former nemesis Paul, and his girlfriend Justine, a rising star in the art scene. From here, he embarks on a doomed road trip into the American heartland, where he meets Wayne Gage. This charismatic, fast-living and deeply damaged Vietnam veteran, collector of exotic animals and would-be spirit guide, draws Will towards the dark conclusion of his journey.

Wild Abandon is a headlong tumble through the falling world of end-days capitalism, a haunting, hyperreal snapshot of our own strange times and what it means to be a tourist, or indeed a human, within them.

A breathtaking new novel from the Stella Prize-winning author of The Strays.

In spring of 2011, a young Australian man travels to the USA.

It is a quest of sorts, a quest as…

'The tall trees nearby called them up and red-tailed black cockatoos carried messages to them that they told no one else about.'

Pushing Back is John Kinsella's most haunting and timely fiction to date. It is populated with eccentric, compelling characters, drifters, unlikely friendships, the silences of dissolving relationships, haunted dwellings and lonely highways, the ghosts of cleared bushland and the threats of right-wing nationalists and senseless destruction.

A couple make love in an abandoned asbestos house, a desperate carpet cleaner beholden to the gig economy begs a financially distressed client not to cancel his booking, an addict cannot bear to see his partner without the watch he once gave her, a mother casts her shearer son's ashes on the property on which he worked, fascists pile into a little red car with the intent of terrorising tourists on the Nullarbor, a man more at home with machinery than people rescues a drowning kitten.

Yet throughout this assured distillation of contemporary Australian life, empathy rises like the red- tailed black cockatoos that appear and reappear, nature coalescing with the human spirit, the animals, the trees, the land, the people pushing back. These stories are at once disturbing, tender and hopeful.

'The tall trees nearby called them up and red-tailed black cockatoos carried messages to them that they told no one else about.'

Pushing Back is John Kinsella's most haunting…

Visual and performance artist, and winner of the inaugural Kill Your Darlings Manuscript Award, SJ Norman turns their hand to fiction with spectacular results.

This brilliant collection of short fiction explores the shifting spaces of desire, loss and longing. Inverting and queering the gothic and romantic traditions, each story represents a different take on the concept of a haunting or the haunted. Though it ranges across themes and locations - from small-town Australia to Hokkaido to rural England - Permafrost is united by the power of the narratorial voice, with its auto-fictional resonances, dark wit and swagger.

Whether recounting the confusion of a child trying to decipher their father and stepmother's new relationship, the surrealness of an after-hours tour of Auschwitz, or a journey to wintry Japan to reconnect with a former lover, Permafrost unsettles, transports and impresses in equal measure.

Visual and performance artist, and winner of the inaugural Kill Your Darlings Manuscript Award, SJ Norman turns their hand to fiction with spectacular results.

This brilliant…

Homecoming pieces together fragments of stories about four generations of Noongar women and explores how they navigated the changing landscapes of colonisation, protectionism, and assimilation to hold their families together.
This seminal collection of poetry, prose and historical colonial archives, tells First Nations truths of unending love for children—those that were present, those taken, those hidden and those that ultimately stood in the light.
Homecoming speaks to the intergenerational dialogue about Country, kin and culture. This elegant and extraordinary form of restorative story work amplifies Aboriginal women’s voices, and enables four generations of women to speak for themselves. This sublime debut highlights the tenacity of family as well as First Nation’s agency to resist, survive and renew.

Elfie Shiosaki has restored humanity and power to her family in this beautifully articulated collection and has given voice to those silenced by our brutal past.

Homecoming pieces together fragments of stories about four generations of Noongar women and explores how they navigated the changing landscapes of colonisation, protectionism, and…

From award-winning and highly acclaimed author and poet Maria Takolander comes her most impressive and personal poetry collection yet. Trigger Warning is not for the fainthearted, but neither are the elemental realities of domestic violence and environmental catastrophe that these astonishing poems address. Comprised of three sections, the first summons a difficult personal history by conversing with poets—from Sylvia Plath to Anne Carson— whose dramatised confessions trigger Takolander’s own. The second part remains focused on the domestic, while redeeming that scene of trauma through a reinventing wit. The final section of this extraordinary book turns its attention outside, playing with poetry itself in order to confront the Anthropocene and the final frontier of death. This is poetry that balances ruthlessness and lyrical beauty; poetry alive to its time and audience; poetry not to be missed.

From award-winning and highly acclaimed author and poet Maria Takolander comes her most impressive and personal poetry collection yet. Trigger Warning is not for the fainthearted,…

Darnmoor, The Gateway to Happiness. The sign taunts a fool into feeling some sense of achievement, some kind of end- that you have reached a destination in the very least. Yet as the sign states, Darnmoor is merely a gateway, a waypoint on the road to where you really want to be.

Darnmoor is the home of the Billymil family, three generations who have lived in this 'gateway town'. Race relations between Indigenous and settler families are fraught, though the rigid status quo is upheld through threats and soft power rather than the overt violence of yesteryear.

As progress marches forwards, Darnmoor and its surrounds undergo rapid social and environmental changes, but as some things change, some stay exactly the same. The Billymil family are watched (and sometimes visited) by ancestral spirits and spirits of the recently deceased, who look out for their descendants and attempt to help them on the right path.

When the town's secrets start to be uncovered the town will be rocked by a violent act that forever shatters a century of silence.

Full of music, Yuwaalaraay language and exquisite description, Song of the Crocodile is a lament to choice and change, and the unyielding land that sustains us all, if only we could listen to it

Darnmoor, The Gateway to Happiness. The sign taunts a fool into feeling some sense of achievement, some kind of end- that you have reached a destination in the very least. Yet as…

Ren lives alone on the remote frontier of a country devastated by a coup. High on the forested slopes, she survives by hunting and trading—and forgetting.

But when a young soldier comes to the mountains in search of a local myth, Ren is inexorably drawn into her impossible mission. As their lives entwine, unravel and erupt—as myths merge with reality—both Ren and the soldier are forced to confront what they regret, what they love, and what they fear.

The Rain Heron is the dizzying, dazzling new novel from the author of Flames.

Ren lives alone on the remote frontier of a country devastated by a coup. High on the forested slopes, she survives by hunting and trading—and forgetting.

But when a young…

When an inland tsunami floods the foothills of a mountain city, a woman survives the inundation of her home, alone. This edgy, potent verse novel circles the scene like the cadaver dog whose work it is to search for those who are missing. Reimagining traditions of bush gothic and outback horror, Luke Best crafts a terrifying and acute psychological portrait of grief and guilt. Loss, cowardice, and trauma pulse through this singular and uncompromising narrative of ecological and personal disaster.

When an inland tsunami floods the foothills of a mountain city, a woman survives the inundation of her home, alone. This edgy, potent verse novel circles the scene like the…

Out on the road, no one speaks, everything talks.

Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. And although Jean talks to all her charges, she has a particular soft spot for a young dingo called Sue.

As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu: its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals — first mammals, then birds and insects, too. As the flu progresses, the unstoppable voices become overwhelming, and many people begin to lose their minds, including Jean’s infected son, Lee. When he takes off with Kimberly, heading south, Jean feels the pull to follow her kin.

Setting off on their trail, with Sue the dingo riding shotgun, they find themselves in a stark, strange world in which the animal apocalypse has only further isolated people from other species. Bold, exhilarating, and wholly original, The Animals in That Country asks what would happen if - for better or worse - we finally understood what animals were saying.

Out on the road, no one speaks, everything talks.

Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on…

‘I was an agent of Dan, a captive of his, really. I went where he wanted me, and did as he wanted, and for a long time, in this way, I was happy.’

It’s been a long winter in a creaky house in Brunswick, where a young man has devoted himself to recreational showers, staring at his phone, and speculating on the activities of his best friend and housemate, Dan. But now summer is coming, and Dan has found a boyfriend and a job, so the young man is being pushed out into the world, in search of friendship and love.

The Adversary is a sticky summer novel about young people exploring their sexuality and their sociability, where everything smells like sunscreen and tastes like beer, but affections and alliances have consequences. It asks what kinds of stories are possible – or desirable – for which kinds of friendships, and what happens when you follow those stories to their natural conclusions.

‘I was an agent of Dan, a captive of his, really. I went where he wanted me, and did as he wanted, and for a long time, in this way, I was happy.’

It’s been a long winter in a…

not in Aus, mate
bad things don't happen here
our beaches are open
they are not places where bloodied mattresses burn

Throatis the explosive second poetry collection from award-winning Mununjali Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven. Exploring love, language and land, van Neerven flexes their distinctive muscles and shines a light on Australia's unreconciled past and precarious present with humour and heart. Van Neerven is unsparing in the interrogation of colonial impulse, and fiercely loyal to telling the stories that make us who we are.

not in Aus, mate
bad things don't happen here
our beaches are open
they are not places where bloodied mattresses burn

Throatis the explosive second poetry collection from…

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Women's Studies, Native Australian Studies. Forty years ago, letters, words and feelings flowed between a teenage daughter and her mother. Letters written by that teenage daughter--me--handed around family back home, disappeared. Yet letters from that mother to her teenage daughter--me--remained protected in my red life-journey suitcase. I carried them across time and landscapes as a mother would carry her baby in a thaga. In 1978-79, I was living in an Aboriginal girls' hostel in the Bentley suburb of Perth, attending senior high school. Mum and I sent handwritten letters to each other. I was a small-town teenager stepping outside of all things I had ever known. Mum remained in the only world she had ever known. NGANAJUNGU YAGU was inspired by Mother's letters, her life and the love she instilled in me for my people and my culture. A substantial part of that culture is language, and I missed out on so much language interaction having moved away. I talk with my ancestors' language--Badimaya and Wajarri--to honour ancestors, language centres, language workers and those Yamaji who have been and remain generous in passing on cultural knowledge.

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Women's Studies, Native Australian Studies. Forty years ago, letters, words and feelings flowed between a teenage daughter and her mother. Letters…

Click here for what we do is a cluster of four loosely connected poems that are not only sceptical of the status quo's serial mendacities and hype but, in a way, they also attempt a coming to terms with the erosion of the idealistic conditions that once made non-mainstream culture, including poetry, so viable and, even, necessary. For Pam Brown writing poetry is a habit, a disorganised ritual. Her poetic inventories begin in everyday bricolage. Real things interrupt the poems the same way thoughts and phrases do. She dismantles monumental intent and then, by mixing (rather than layering), splices the remains into a melange of imagery and thoughtful lyric. Hers is a friendly intelligence that clues in connections to the 'social' as the poems make political and personal associative links. Spurning any lofty design these poems debug the absurdities of contemporary materialism with surreptitious humour. Though disquiet is present it's usually temporary. Here, thinking about the future can be 'trickgensteinian' and yet Pam Brown's poems offer a circumspect optimism.

Click here for what we do is a cluster of four loosely connected poems that are not only sceptical of the status quo's serial mendacities and hype but, in a way, they also attempt…

Winner of the 2016 Thomas Shapcott Prize for Poetry and the 2018 ALS Gold Medal. With its wildness and originality, The Agonist is an exhilarating collection. Exploring the languages of anatomy, etymology and incantation, these poems spark conversations about fracture and repair, energy, love and danger.

Winner of the 2016 Thomas Shapcott Prize for Poetry and the 2018 ALS Gold Medal. With its wildness and originality, The Agonist is an exhilarating collection. Exploring the…

A gripping and beautifully written novel in the tradition of Elizabeth is Missing and the work of Elizabeth Harrower.

I have no use for forgiveness, not yet. But other ideas like that,
kindness, for example, I think that is fundamental. Resurrection;
I like that too. And love, of course, love, love, love.

Alice Murray learns to play the piano aged three on an orange orchard in rural Australia. Recognising her daughter's gift, her mother sends Alice to boarding school in the bleak north of England, and there Alice stays for the rest of her childhood. Then she's offered a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London, and on a summer school in Oxford she meets Edward, an economics professor who sweeps her off her feet.

Alice soon finds that Edwards is damaged, and she's trapped. She clings to her playing and to her dream of becoming a concert pianist, until disaster strikes. Increasingly isolated as the years unravel, eventually Alice can't find it in herself to carry on. Then she hears the most beautiful music from the walls of her house …

This novel's love story is that of a woman who must embrace life again if she is to survive. Inspiring and compelling, it explores the dark terrain of violence and the transformative powers of music and love.

A gripping and beautifully written novel in the tradition of Elizabeth is Missing and the work of Elizabeth Harrower.

I have no use for forgiveness, not yet. But other ideas…

Daniel Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne from 1917 until his death, aged ninety-nine, in 1963, was a towering figure in Melbourne's Catholic community. But his political interventions had a profound effect on the wider Australian nation too.

Award-winning biographer Brenda Niall has made some unexpected discoveries in Irish and Australian archives which overturn some widely held views. She also draws on her own memories of meeting and interviewing Mannix to get to the essence of this man of contradictions, controversies and mystery.

Mannix is not only an astonishing new look at a remarkable life, but a fascinating depiction of Melbourne in the first half last century.

Brenda Niall is one of Australia's foremost biographers. She is the author of four award-winning biographies, including her acclaimed accounts of the Boyd family. Brenda has degrees from the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University and Monash University. She has held visiting fellowships at the University of Michigan, Yale University and the Australian National University. In 2004 she was awarded the Order of Australia for 'services to Australian literature, as an academic, biographer and literary critic'. She frequently reviews for the Age, Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Book Review.

Daniel Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne from 1917 until his death, aged ninety-nine, in 1963, was a towering figure in Melbourne's Catholic community. But his political…

Beginning with the disastrous events of the night before her fortieth birthday, in Second Half First Drusilla Modjeska looks back on the experiences of the past thirty years that have shaped her writing, her reading and the way she has lived.

From a childhood in England, and her parents' difficult marriage, to her time as a young newlywed living with her husband in Papua New Guinea; arriving as a single woman in Sydney in the 1970s and building close friendships with writers such as Helen Garner, with whom she lived in the bookish ‘house on the corner', and the lovers who would – sometimes briefly – derail her, to returning to Papua thirty years later to found a literacy program, this new book by Drusilla Modjeska is an intensely personal and moving account of an examined life.

In asking the candid questions that so many of us face - about love and independence, the death of a partner, growing older, the bonds of friendship and family - Drusilla Modjeska reassesses parts of her life, her work, the importance to her of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, among many others. The result is a memoir that is at once intellectually provocative and deeply honest; the book that readers of Poppy, The Orchard and Stravinsky's Lunch have been waiting for.

Beginning with the disastrous events of the night before her fortieth birthday, in Second Half First Drusilla Modjeska looks back on the experiences of the past thirty years that…

Six Bedrooms is about growing up; about discovering sex; and about coming of age. Full of glorious angst, embarrassment and small achievements.

Hot afternoons on school ovals, the terrifying promise of losing your virginity, sneaking booze from your mother's pantry, the painful sophistication and squalor of your first share house, cancer, losing a parent.

Tegan Bennett Daylight's powerful collection captures the dangerous, tilting terrain of becoming adult. Over these ten stories, we find acute portrayals of loss and risk, of sexual longing and wreckage, blunders and betrayals. Threaded through the collection is the experience of troubled, destructive Tasha, whose life unravels in unexpected ways, and who we come to love for her defiance, her wit and her vulnerability.

Stunningly written, and shot through with humour and menace, Six Bedrooms is a mesmerising collection of moments from adolescence through adulthood, a mix of all the potent ingredients that make up a life.

Six Bedrooms is about growing up; about discovering sex; and about coming of age. Full of glorious angst, embarrassment and small achievements.

Hot afternoons on school ovals,…

On a beach in Antarctica, scientist Adam Leith marks the passage of the summer solstice. Back in Sydney his partner Ellie waits for the results of her latest round of IVF treatment.

That result, when it comes, will change both their lives and propel them into a future neither could have predicted. In a collapsing England, Adam will battle to survive an apocalyptic storm. Against a backdrop of growing civil unrest at home, Ellie will discover a strange affinity with beekeeping. In the aftermath of a pandemic, a young man finds solace in building virtual recreations of the dead. And new connections will be formed from the most unlikely beginnings.

On a beach in Antarctica, scientist Adam Leith marks the passage of the summer solstice. Back in Sydney his partner Ellie waits for the results of her latest round of IVF…