Beneath the Fig Leaves by Olympia Panagiotopoulos

$32.99 AUD

Category: Australian Fiction

 In 1955, in a village in Greece that was marred by war and poverty, Giannoula and Fotios Panagiotopoulos dreamed of providing a better life for their children. Australia, it was rumoured, was a land of opportunity where hard work brought reward. Leaving behind family and friends, they set off to m ake a new home on the other side of the world. Half a lifetime later, under the shade of a fig tree and in the dappled Melbourne sunlight, Giannoula regales her youngest daughter, Olympia, with stories of her homeland and journey. An evocative exploration of the ties that bind, Beneath the Fig Leaves weaves an irresistible tapestry of family, food and history to stir the heart and senses.   ...Show more

Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton

$19.99 AUD

Category: Australian Fiction | Reading Level: very good

An utterly wonderful debut novel of love, crime, magic, fate and a boy's coming of age, set in 1980s Australia and infused with the originality, charm, pathos, and heart of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The mind can take you anywhere you want to go. Eli Bell's life is complicated. His father is lost, his mother is in jail, and his stepdad is a heroin dealer. The most steadfast adult in Eli's life is Slim--a notorious felon and national record-holder for successful prison escapes--who watches over Eli and August, his silent genius of an older brother. Exiled far from the rest of the world in Darra, a seedy suburb populated by Polish and Vietnamese refugees, this twelve-year-old boy with an old soul and an adult mind is just trying to follow his heart, learn what it takes to be a good man, and train for a glamorous career in journalism. Life, however, insists on throwing obstacles in Eli's path--most notably Tytus Broz, Brisbane's legendary drug dealer. But the real trouble lies ahead. Eli is about to fall in love, face off against truly bad guys, and fight to save his mother from a certain doom--all before starting high school. A story of brotherhood, true love, family, and the most unlikely of friendships, Boy Swallows Universe is the tale of an adolescent boy on the cusp of discovering the man he will be. Powerful and kinetic, Trent Dalton's debut is sure to be one of the most heartbreaking, joyous and exhilarating novels you will experience. ...Show more

The Loudness of Unsaid Things by Hilde Hinton

$29.99 AUD

Category: Australian Fiction

 If you loved BOY SWALLOWS UNIVERSE and LOST AND FOUND, you will love this debut novel. A stunning story about family, loneliness and isolation that will make you laugh, cry and be a bit kinder to those who are lost. 'My heart grew, then broke, then mended itself. A wise, funny,  ;brave novel and a story that you will never want to forget.' Favel Parrett An unforgettable story of loneliness, isolation and finding your way. Heart-wrenching, wise and wryly funny, this novel will make you kinder to those who are lost.Miss Kaye works at The Institute. A place for the damaged, the outliers, the not-quite rights. Everyone has different strategies to deal with the residents. Some bark orders. Some negotiate tirelessly. Miss Kaye found that simply being herself was mostly the right thing to do.Susie was seven when she realised she'd had her fill of character building. She'd lie between her Holly Hobbie sheets thinking how slowly birthdays come around, but how quickly change happened. One minute her Dad was saying that the family needed to move back to the city and then, SHAZAM, they were there. Her mum didn't move to the new house with them. And Susie hated going to see her mum at the mind hospital. She never knew who her mum would be. Or who would be there. As the years passed, there were so many things Susie wanted to say but never could. Miss Kaye will teach Susie that the loudness of unsaid things can be music - and together they will learn that living can be more than surviving.   ...Show more

Below Deck by Sophie Hardcastle

$29.99 AUD

Category: Australian Fiction

   And then, just like that, a thought bubbles inside me. It's a beginning; a new beginning; my beginning. The beginning of the story I tell myself in order to survive. We choose to breathe, don't we?Twenty-one-year-old Olivia hears the world in colour, but her life is mottled grey. Estranged from her parents, and living with her grandfather who is drowning in sadness, Oli faces the reality of life beyond university alone.When she wakes on a boat with no recollection of how she got there, she accepts the help of two strangers who change the course of her future forever. With Mac and Maggie, Oli learns to navigate a life upon open ocean and the world flowers into colours she's never seen before.Four years later, Oli, fluent in the language of the sea, is the only woman among men on a yacht delivery from Noumea to Auckland. In the darkness below deck, she learns that at sea, no one can hear you scream.Moving to London, Oli's life at sea is buried. When she meets Hugo, the wind changes, and her memories are dust blown into shapes. Reminding her of everything.Below Deck is about the moments that haunt us, the moments that fan out like ripples through the deep. So that everything else, becomes everything after. ...Show more

Gulliver's Wife by Lauren Chater

$32.99 AUD

Category: Australian Fiction

Birth. Death. Wonder ... One woman's journey to the edge of love and loyalty from the bestselling author of The Lace Weaver London, 1702. When her husband is lost at sea, Mary Burton Gulliver, midwife and herbalist, is forced to rebuild her life without him. But three years later when Lemuel Gulliv er is brought home, fevered and communicating only in riddles, her ordered world is turned upside down. In a climate of suspicion, poverty and violence, Mary is caught in a crossfire of superstition and fear driven by her husband's outlandish claims of the wonders he has seen, and it is up to her to navigate a passage to safety for herself and her daughter, and the vulnerable women in her care. But when a fellow sailor, a dangerous man with nothing to lose, appears to hold sway over her husband, Mary's world descends deeper into chaos, and she must set out on her own journey to discover the truth of Gulliver's travels ... and the landscape of her own heart. Praise for The Lace Weaver 'A beautifully written and utterly compelling story of love and war ... exquisite as the lace the women of the story weave' Kate Forsyth 'I was captivated from the first page' Natasha Lester 'Full of hope and heartache' Books+Publishing ...Show more

MUTE

$29.99 AUD

Category: Australian Fiction

Night Lessons in Little Jerusalem by Rick Held

$29.99 AUD

Category: Australian Fiction

The hero of this book was not a saint, nor even a tzadik - the nearest Jewish equivalent - but he was a hero. Someone who risked his own life to make a difference to the life of another. Were his motives selfless? No. He was after all flesh and blood. A man. And a very young one. But life is not black a nd white. Heroes are not without their flaws. This is his story. Tholdi is a romantic. A musical prodigy whose brilliant future is extinguished when the horror unfolding across Europe arrives at his door. One day he's captivated by the beautiful, mysterious Lyuba who he meets on his sixteenth birthday; the next he wakes to the terrors of war as the Nazi-allied Romanians attack his town of Czernowitz. A ghetto is built to imprison the town's Jews before herding them onto trains bound for the concentration camps of Transnistria. With each passing day, Tholdi and his parents await their turn. And then Fate intervenes, giving them all a reprieve. At the weaving mill Tholdi secures work that spares him. He is elated. Until he discovers the two brothers who run the mill are Nazi collaborators hiding a terrible secret: the threat of transportation remains. When Tholdi sees one of the brothers with Lyuba, he glimpses a way to save himself and his family. But the stakes of his gamble are high. Will Lyuba be the key to their survival, or will Tholdi's infatuation with her become a dangerous obsession that guarantees their death? NIGHT LESSONS IN LITTLE JERUSALEM is an unforgettable debut novel of war, family and love. ...Show more

On a Barbarous Coast by Craig Cormick; Harold Ludwick

$29.99 AUD

Category: Australian Fiction

On a Barbarous Coast is an alternative retelling of Captain James Cook's story co-written by Craig Cormick and Harold Ludwick in the tradition of imagined histories. We were becoming the wild things we most feared, but could not see it at the time.On a night of raging winds and rain, Captain Cook's&nbs p;Endeavour lies splintered on a coral reef off the coast of far north Australia. A small disparate band of survivors, fracturing already, huddle on the shore of this strange land - their pitiful salvage scant protection from the dangers of the unknown creatures and natives that live here. Watching these mysterious white beings, the Guugu Yimidhirr people cannot decide if they are ancestor spirits to be welcomed - or hostile spirits to be speared. One headstrong young boy, Garrgiil, determines to do more than watch and to be the one to find out what exactly they are. Fierce, intriguing and thoughtful, On a Barbarous Coast is the story of a past and future that might have been.'Australia's "origin" story brilliantly re-imagined, in which Indigenous Australians rightfully assume their central place.' Susan Johnson, author of The Broken Book ...Show more

The Application of Pressure by Rachael Mead

$29.99 AUD

Category: Australian Fiction

   For paramedics Tash and Joel, a regular workday is like a supercut of the worst days of other people’s lives. They maintain their sanity through a friendship built on black humour, but as the constant exposure to trauma takes its toll, both, in different ways, must fight to preserve their mental health and relationships – even with one another. How much pressure can they handle, and what will happen when they finally crack? With each chapter revolving around an emergency – some frightening, some moving, some simply funny –Rachael Mead digs beneath the surface of gore and grit to lay bare the humanity of emergency services personnel and their patients. This breathtaking novel reveals not only the trauma of a life lived on the front line of medicine, but also the essential, binding friendships that make such a life possible. ...Show more

The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld

$32.99 AUD

Category: Australian Fiction

The lives of three women weave together across four centuries in the dazzling new book from Evie Wyld, a Granta Best of Young British Novelist Surging out of the sea, the Bass Rock has for centuries borne witness to the lives that pass under its shadow on the Scottish mainland. And across the centuries, the fates of three women are inextricably linked to this place and to each other. Sarah, accused of being a witch, is fleeing for her life. Ruth, in the aftermath of the Second World War, is navigating a new marriage and the strange waters of the local community. Six decades later, Viv, still mourning the death of her father, is cataloguing Ruth's belongings in the now-empty house. As each woman's story unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that their choices are circumscribed, in ways big and small, by the men who seek to control them. But in sisterhood there is also the possibility of survival and a new way of life. Intricately crafted and compulsively readable, The Bass Rock burns bright with anger and heart - a devastating indictment of the violence that men have inflicted on women throughout the ages. ...Show more

Wedding Puzzle by Sallie Muirden

$10.00 AUD

Category: Australian Fiction

On the morning of her wedding, 24-year-old Beth Shaw drives down the peninsula to the Portsea Hotel. She is uneasy and confused because she has just learnt something devastating about her fiancé, Jordan, that completely changes her view of him. As Beth's old schoolmates and her relatives arrive f or the big day at the bay side idyll, Beth contemplates her childhood in suburbia. She worshipped the school relay runners, one of whom was Jordan's high school sweetheart. Painful memories of earlier disloyalties and betrayals resurface. Her dreams and wedding threaten to spin out of control. Will the truth ever be known? And must she make a fateful decision about more than the wedding arrangements? Award-winning author Sallie Muirden deftly evokes the contradictions of human behaviour, and growing up in the 70s and 80s. With its Austenesque feel, Wedding Puzzle is an astute, entertaining and often tense comedy of manners, that both questions and celebrates our choice of partner and the decision to marry as the key moment in our lives. 'Muirden captures Beth's messy transition to adulthood with warmth and wisdom--Wedding Puzzle is shrewd, nostalgic and intelligent.' Toni Jordan, author of Addition and The Fragments ...Show more

After Australia by Michael Mohammed Ahmad (Editor)

$24.99 AUD

Category: Australian Fiction

Climate catastrophe, police brutality, white genocide, totalitarian rule and the erasure of black history provide the backdrop for stories of love, courage and hope. In this unflinching new anthology, eleven of Australia's most daring Indigenous writers and writers of colour provide a glimpse of Austral ia as we head toward the year 2050. Featuring Ambelin Kwaymullina, Claire G. Coleman, Omar Sakr, Future D. Fidel, Karen Wyld, Khalid Warsame, Kaya Lattimore, Sarah Ross, Zoya Patel, Michelle Law and Hannah Donnelly. Edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad. Original concept by Lena Nahlous. Published by Affirm Press in partnership with Diversity Arts Australia and Sweatshop Literacy Movement. ...Show more