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books tagged “australian fiction”
books tagged “australian fiction”
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And the Ass Saw the Angelby Nick CaveISBN 1880985721 (1-880985-72-1)
Softcover, 2 13 61
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› Find signed collectible books: 'And the Ass Saw the Angel'Book summary:Born to a drunken mother and a hunter father, Euchrid Eucrow yearns to express the intense feelings he has for the world around him and is driven deeper and deeper into a mad angelic vision. Reprint. [via]
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Bliss - the Screenplayby Peter Carey, Ray LawrenceISBN 0702219096 (0-7022-1909-6)
Softcover, Univ of Queensland Pr
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Bodysurfersby Robert DreweISBN 0949493023 (0-949493-02-3)
Softcover, J. Fraser
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The Book Thiefby Markus ZusakISBN 0786290218 (0-7862-9021-8)
Hardcover, Thorndike Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Book Thief'Book summary:'It's just a small story, really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, a Jewish fist fighter, and quite a lot of thievery ...' This work is narrated in the all-knowing matter-of-fact voice of Death, witnessing the story of the citizens of Himmel Street: When nine-year-old Liesel arrives outside the boxlike house of her new foster parents, she refuses to get out of the car. Liesel has been separated from her parents - 'Kommunists' - for ever, and at the burial of her little brother, she steals a gravedigger's instruction manual which she can't read. It is the beginning of her illustrious career. In the care of the Hubermans, Liesel befriends blond-haired Rudy Steiner, her neighbour obsessed with Jesse Owens. She also befriends the mayor's wife, who hides from despair in her library. Together Liesel and Rudy steal books - from Nazi book burning piles, from the mayor's library, from the richer people of Molching. In time, the family hide a Jewish boxer, Max, who reads with Liesel in the basement.. By 1943, the Allied bombs are falling, and the sirens begin to wail. Liesel shares out her books in the air-raid shelters. But one day in the life of Himmel street, the wail of the sirens comes too late...A life-changing tale of the cruel twists of fate and the coincidences on which all our lives hinge, this is also a joyous look at the power of book to nourish the soul. Its uplifting ending will make all readers weep. [via]
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Cloudstreet: Library Editionby Tim WintonISBN 1555971830 (1-55597-183-0)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cloudstreet: Library Edition'Book summary:Hailed as a classic, Tim Winton's masterful family saga is both a paean to working-class Australians and an unflinching examination of the human heart's capacity for sorrow, joy, and endless gradations in between. An award-winning work, Cloudstreet exemplifies the brilliant ability of fiction to captivate and inspire.
Struggling to rebuild their lives after being touched by disaster, the Pickle family, who've inherited a big house called Cloudstreet in a suburb of Perth, take in the God-fearing Lambs as tenants. The Lambs have suffered their own catastrophes, and determined to survive, they open up a grocery on the ground floor. From 1944 to 1964, the shared experiences of the two overpopulated clans -- running the gamut from drunkenness, adultery, and death to resurrection, marriage, and birth -- bond them to each other and to the bustling, haunted house in ways no one could have anticipated. [via]
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Death of a River Guideby Richard FlanaganISBN 0802138632 (0-8021-3863-2)
Softcover, Grove Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Death of a River Guide'Book summary:In this brilliant, labyrinthine second novel, a drowning man named Aljaz Cosini is granted visions of his family history stretching into the distant past--even as he revisits his final days along the remote and treacherous Franklin River. Richard Flanagan's protagonist has been away from Tasmania for the last decade. Sick, lonely, and financially strapped, he returns to his hometown and soon runs into an old colleague known as Pig's Breath, who offers him a low-paying stint as a river guide:
I can see that Pig's Breath knows Aljaz well enough to see that Aljaz desperately wants to visit the Franklin River country, that there is a need in him, which Pig's Breath does not have, to go back there, and that this is his only way of doing it. And while Aljaz sits there trying to look as if he is chewing over numbers, Pig's Breath can tell that what he is in fact doing is smelling the river, hearing it run, watching the rain mists rise from its valleys, drinking its tea-coloured waters from his cupped hands.
Flanagan (The Sound of One Hand Clapping) has been compared to Faulkner for his loving attention to place, but his narrative talents are more akin to those of Günter Grass. There are echoes of The Tin Drum in the picaresque tale of Aljaz's emergence from the womb, wrapped in the caul that suggests second sight. Throughout, a series of similarly magical occurrences lends sparkle, if little illumination, to these hardscrabble lives in the Tasmanian wilderness. All of which goes to explain why Death of a River Guide is an unusually rich novel, and one of Australia's most distinguished literary exports in recent years. --Regina Marler [via]-
Dirt Musicby Tim WintonISBN 0330490265 (0-330-49026-5)
Softcover, Macmillan Pub Ltd
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dirt Music'Book summary:Arguably one of the finest of all Australian novelists, Tim Winton shows that he remains in top form with Dirt Music, a wistful, charged, ardent novel of female loss and amatory redemption. The setting is Winton's favorite: the thorn-bushed, sheep-farmed, sun-punished boondocks of Western Australia. The cast is limited but spirited: the two chief protagonists are Georgie Jutland, a fortysomething adoptive mother with a vodka problem, and Luther Fox, a brooding, feral, bushwhacking poacher.
The plot is something else altogether: an elegantly wearied, cleverly finessed mutual odyssey that opts to follow the sometimes intertwining, sometimes diverging lives of poor Georgie and Luther as they try to deal with the odd alliance they comprise, as well as the complex and fractured lives they want to leave behind. The way Georgie deals with her unwitting inheritance of two dissatisfied adopted kids is particularly touching, poignant, and well written.
Best of all, though, is the prose. Somehow it manages to be simultaneously juicy and dry, like a desert cactus. This is especially true when Winton touches on the scented harshness of the Down Under outback: "the music is jagged and pushy and he for one just doesn't want to bloody hear it, but the outbursts of strings and piano are as austere and unconsoling as the pindan plain out there with its spindly acacia and red soil." This is a wise and accomplished novel. --Sean Thomas, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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Dislocationsby Janette Turner HospitalISBN 0807115088 (0-8071-1508-8)
Hardcover, Louisiana State Univ Pr
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Eucalyptusby Murray BailISBN 1860464955 (1-86046-495-5)
Softcover, Harvill Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eucalyptus'Book summary:"The idea that Holland's daughter was like the princess locked in the tower of a damp castle was of course false. After all, she was living on a property in western New South Wales."
Once upon a time, on a property in western New South Wales, a man named Holland plants hundreds of varieties of eucalyptus trees, then decrees that only the suitor who can name each and every one of them will be worthy to marry his beautiful daughter, Ellen. Men try and fail: there is the gentle schoolteacher who "had correctly named eighty-seven eucalypts and was doing it well when he went blank at the fatly handsome Jarrah up against the fence behind the house"; and the New Zealander who "came up against, and was defeated by, one of the many Stringybarks..." Old men, young men, commercial travelers, sheep-shearers--even a "smiling Chinaman ... all the way from Darwin." Not one is successful. Then, one day, along comes Mr. Roy Cave, a man renowned in the eucalyptus world, someone who "employed with lip-smacking relish the terms 'petiole,' 'inflorescences,' 'falacte' and 'lanceolate,' and he was also comfortable with 'sessile', 'fusiform' and 'conculorous.'"
Even in so wonderfully fractured a fairy tale as Murray Bail's Eucalyptus, it's obvious that Roy Cave is hardly the stuff romantic dreams are made of. Indeed, despite her father's warning to "beware of any man who deliberately tells a story," Ellen's Prince Charming turns out to be a mysterious young stranger who finds her wandering among her father's trees and spins her tale after tale, each one tied to a different kind of eucalypt. As the weeks go by, Mr. Cave continues to successfully identify every tree on the property, thus drawing ever closer to his prize. Meanwhile, Ellen's other suitor captures first her imagination and then her heart with stories of apprentice hairdressers who fall in love with plain-Jane heiresses; solicitors' daughters involved with married men; and lonely canary breeders who almost find happiness with spinster piano teachers. What all of these off-kilter stories have in common is a theme of missed opportunities, and lovers who realize too late that they were made for each other. Will Ellen, too, end up like one of these the sad-hearted heroines, or will her would-be lover find a way to thwart Mr. Cave's relentless victory march through the Eucalypts to claim her hand?
There is so much to love about Bail's novel that it's difficult to identify exactly which of its qualities make it such a complete delight. Is it Ellen's "speckled beauty ... so covered in small brown-black moles she attracted men, every sort of man"? Is it the detailed descriptions of the landscape? The way Bail uses them to comment on human nature, on the nature of storytelling and of language itself ("a paragraph is not so different from a paddock--similar shape, similar function")? Or is it the wacky charm of the Scheharezade-like suitor's urban tales? ("Still in the vicinity of low-height eucalypts he went on to mention, in a thoughtful voice, how in an outer suburb of Hobart an actuary with a well-known insurance company needed a stepladder to woo a widow who passed by his house every day.") Whatever the source of Bail's peculiar magic, Eucalyptus casts a spell that will carry readers from first page to last and leave them wishing for a thousand and one more stories just like it. --Alix Wilber [via]
Far Countryby Nevil ShuteISBN 1842322516 (1-84232-251-6)
Hardcover, House of Stratus, Incorporated
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Far Country'Book summary:Jennifer fled the drab monotony of post-war London. When she landed in Australia, it was like coming home. She loved it and when she met Carl, she had every reason to stay.
But the two of them came from quite different worlds, and it is the story of their building a life together that Nevil Shute tells in his matchless way. With warmth and understanding, and with his natural affection for the people he creates, the author brings to life his characters and the pioneer country in which they live.
"New lives for old...on a fresh, vital, expanding frontier! This is the exciting background of this heartlifting novel by a master weaver of romance and adventure." (Boston Herald) [via]
A Fringe of Leavesby Patrick WhiteISBN 0140186107 (0-14-018610-7)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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The Getting of Wisdomby Henry Handel RichardsonISBN 1404305610 (1-4043-0561-0)
Softcover, Indypublish.Com
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Getting of Wisdom'More editions of The Getting of Wisdom:
- The Getting of Wisdom: ISBN 1562790420 (1-56279-042-0)
Hardcover, Mercury House - The Getting of Wisdom: ISBN 1582871973 (1-58287-197-3)
Hardcover, North Books - The Getting of Wisdom: ISBN 1582876797 (1-58287-679-7)
Hardcover, North Books - The Getting of Wisdom: ISBN 0860681793 (0-86068-179-3)
Softcover, Trafalgar Square - The Getting of Wisdom: ISBN 1404305610 (1-4043-0561-0)
Softcover, Indypublish.Com
- The Getting of Wisdom: ISBN 1562790420 (1-56279-042-0)
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The Getting of Wisdomby Clive T. Probyn, Bruce Steele, Henry Handel RichardsonISBN 0702231797 (0-7022-3179-7)
Softcover, Univ of Queensland Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Getting of Wisdom'Book summary:Set in an Australian boarding school at the turn of the century, this book is a tale of the trials of adolescence. [via]
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Gould's Book of Fishby Richard FlanaganISBN 0802139590 (0-8021-3959-0)
Softcover, Grove Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gould's Book of Fish'Book summary:Gould's Book of Fish, an extraordinary work of fact-based fiction by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan (Death of a River Guide) is a journey through the fringe madness of Down Under colonialism. Set during the 1830s in a hellish island prison colony off the Tasmanian coast, the novel plucks a real-life thief and prisoner, English forger William Buelow Gould, from the pages of history to act as protagonist-narrator. Through Gould's unique capacity to blend hyperbole, hyperrealism, and self-effacing honesty, the reader acquires a shockingly clear picture of daily torment on the island. Yet more remarkable is Gould's portrait of bizarre ambitions among prison authorities to further principles of art and science amidst so much misery. Key to such plans is Gould's talent as a painter and illustrator. The compound's surgeon, nursing hopes of publishing a definitive guide to the island's fish, leans heavily on Gould's ability to record the taxonomy of various species. Though Gould accommodates his masters, the manuscript, in his hands, becomes testimony to their perverse dreams of civilization and his own quick-witted survival instincts. Throughout, Flanagan never loses the well-imagined voice of Gould's candor or the character's dense descriptive powers, talents that translate into a thrilling text that reads like a blend of Melville and Burgess. --Tom Keogh [via]
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The Great Worldby David MaloufISBN 0679748369 (0-679-74836-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Great World'Book summary:Nowhere are war monuments 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. This novel gives a voice to that experience. It won the Commonwealth Prize for Literature in 1991. [via]
Henry Handel Richardsonby Susan Lever, Catherine Pratt, Henry Handel RichardsonISBN 0702229180 (0-7022-2918-0)
Softcover, Univ of Queensland Pr
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The Idea of Perfectionby Kate GrenvilleISBN 0142002852 (0-14-200285-2)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Idea of Perfection'Book summary:Harley Savage is a plain woman, a part-time museum curator and quilting expert with three failed marriages and a heart condition. Douglas Cheeseman is a shy, gawky engineer with jug-handle ears, one marriage gone sour, and a crippling lack of physical courage. They meet in the little Australian town of Karakarook, where Harley has arrived to help the town build a heritage museum and Douglas to demolish the quaint old Bent Bridge. From the beginning they are on a collision course until the unexpected sets them both free.[via]
Elegantly and compassionately told, The Idea of Perfection is reminiscent of the work of Carol Shields and Annie Proulx and reveals Kate Grenville as "a writer of extraordinary talent" (The New York Times Book Review).More editions of The Idea of Perfection:
Illywhackerby Peter CareyISBN 0679767908 (0-679-76790-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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An Imaginary Lifeby David MaloufISBN 0679767932 (0-679-76793-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'An Imaginary Life'Book summary:In the first century A.D., Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, Malouf has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving novel. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with the spirit world.Then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it.
"A work of unusual intelligence and imagination, full of surprising images and insights...One of those rare books you end up underlining and copying out into notebooks and reading out loud to friends."--The New York Times Book Review [via] -
Jack Maggsby Peter CareyISBN 0679760377 (0-679-76037-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jack Maggs'Book summary:"Jack Maggs is a dazzling tale of obsession, and Jack Maggs stands as a remarkable character, a resurrected antipodean lag returned to England for vengeance and reconciliation."
--Thomas Keneally
From the Booker Prize-winning author, a vivid and robust novel of Dickensian London--a place and a story teeming with mystery, science, and passion.
The time, the 1830s. Jack Maggs, a foundling trained in the fine arts of thievery, cruelly betrayed and deported to Australia, has now reversed his fortunes--and seeks to fulfill his well-concealed, innermost desire. Returning "home" under threat of execution, he inveigles his way into a household in Great Queen Street, where he's quickly embroiled in various emotional entanglements--and where he falls under the hypnotic scrutiny of Tobias Oates, a celebrated young writer fascinated by the process of mesmerism and obsessed with the criminal mind.
From this volatile milieu emerges a handful of vividly drawn characters in the dangerous pursuit of love, whether romantic or familial--each of them with secrets, and secret longings, that could spell certain ruin. And as their various schemes converge, the captivating figure at the center is Jack Maggs himself, at once frightening, mystifying, and utterly compelling.
"Imaginative and audacious . . . A twentieth-century, post-colonial Dickens novel . . . This strange, bold, gripping, and wonderful novel is the story of a power struggle, a double love story, a quest story, and a story of trickery and disguise. It's about taking possession--of an inheritance, of another person's soul, of your own destiny--and being taken possession of. Not least, it's the story of one writer's being possessed by another."
--Hermione Lee, The Observer
"Uncommonly exciting and engaging. As much as anyone now writing, Peter Carey is a master of storytelling. His empathy with his characters, combined with his psychological sharp-sightedness, has them almost jumping off the page in full human complexity. An especial bonus is his style . . . Vivid, exact, unexpected images and language match the quick, witty intelligence flickering through this novel, and make it a triumph of ebullient indictment, humane insight, and creative generosity."
--Peter Kemp, Sunday Times (London)
"Writing and philosophical contemplations of the highest order . . . On a par with, and more interesting than, his two earlier masterpieces . . . An absorbing, beautifully written novel finished off with a most satisfactory happy ending, and with incidents, an atmosphere, and ideas that linger in the mind."
--Carmen Callil, The Daily Telegraph [via] 
The Lamplighterby Anthony O'NeillISBN 0743243498 (0-7432-4349-8)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster, Incorporated
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lamplighter: A Novel'Book summary:Edinburgh, 1860s: At the Fountainbridge Institute for Destitute Girls, clever orphan Evelyn Todd spins fantastic tales of the lamplighter who passes her window nightly. Her imaginings, forbidden by the home's strict governor, are all but forgotten when Evelyn is spirited away by a man who claims to be her father.
Years later, a wave of vicious killings stains the city's cobbled streets. Three men from different worlds are drawn to the sensational case: a detective hungry for recognition, a disillusioned professor of logic, and a strapping gravedigger. Their paths lead to Evelyn Todd, a woman haunted by dreams of the murders and of a mysterious lamplighter. As her nighttime terrors begin to illuminate the face of the dreadful predator, this unusual trio of investigators uses reason, intuition, philosophy, and luck in a hunt that rapidly hurtles past the bounds of conventional detection. [via]
Legacyby Nevil ShuteISBN 0688019773 (0-688-01977-3)
Hardcover, Harpercollins
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The Man Who Loved Childrenby Christina SteadISBN 0312280440 (0-312-28044-0)
Softcover, Picador USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Man Who Loved Children'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) [via]
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My Life As A Fakeby Peter CareyISBN 1400030889 (1-4000-3088-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Life as a Fake'Book summary:Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake is a literate mystery of forgeries and doppelgangers with a fictional manuscript at its heart. The mystery--the origin of a brilliant but purportedly faked poem--fuels a whirlwind pursuit through Australia and across the wilds of Malaysia. Grappling with her own childhood demons, Carey's bibliophile sleuth, Sarah Wode-Douglass, sometimes becomes lost in the exotic and bloody chase.
The novel opens as Sarah, the reluctant tourist and editor of The Modern Review, is dragged by a foppish poet-friend, John Slater, to Kuala Lumpur. Sarah is intent on biding her time in her hotel, but a chance encounter with a scabrous reader of Rilke soon transforms Sarah's plans and, ultimately, her life. The reader, the Australian poet Christopher Chubb, is the disgraced initiator of a great literary hoax--the faked poems of the non-existent Bob McCorkle. The McCorkle hoax was Chubb's attempt to bring down a rising poetry editor, David Weiss. When the hoax was exposed, Weiss was believed to have committed suicide. But, living in exile, Chubb has hidden a secret for decades: Bob McCorkle had seemingly materialized in human form, killing Weiss and destroying Chubb's life. Sarah is tantalized by a fragment of supposed McCorkle poetry that Chubb has shared with her. Whether it is a fake or the work of a madman, Sarah believes it is genius. Her obsession, however, drives her and Chubb to the precipice of self-destruction.
The primary story--Chubb's pursuit of McCorkle--lives in the fictional past, and the plot occasionally becomes muddled in the nest of narrators recalling conversations second or third hand. In playing out the McCorkle affair, Careys denouement comes too quickly. If Sarah is transformed, Carey doesn't reveal enough of her in the text. He is mesmerized, as is the reader, by Chubb's horrific tale.
With its small shortcomings, the novel offers a sophisticated interrogation of authorship and fakery and the power of art. Carey avoids simplifying the McCorkle mystery, leaving the reader to puzzle out McCorkle's bizarre incarnation. While My Life as a Fake is frequently entertaining, the atmospheric mystery occasionally glimpses the profound. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]
More editions of My Life As A Fake:
- My Life As A Fake: ISBN 1740512464 (1-74051-246-4)
Hardcover, Random House Australia - My Life As A Fake: ISBN 0571216218 (0-571-21621-8)
Softcover, Faber & Faber - My Life As a Fake: ISBN 0375414983 (0-375-41498-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group - My Life as a Fake: ISBN 1400030889 (1-4000-3088-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
- My Life As A Fake: ISBN 1740512464 (1-74051-246-4)
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On the Beachby Nevil ShuteISBN 1842322761 (1-84232-276-1)
Softcover, House of Stratus Ltd
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On the Beach'Book summary:"The most shocking fiction I have read in years. What is shocking about it is both the idea and the sheer imaginative brilliance with which Mr. Shute brings it off."
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
They are the last generation, the innocent victims of an accidental war, living out their last days, making do with what they have, hoping for a miracle. As the deadly rain moves ever closer, the world as we know it winds toward an inevitable end.... [via]More editions of On the Beach:
- On the Beach: ISBN 0345311485 (0-345-31148-5)
Softcover, Ballantine Books - On the Beach: ISBN 0884113493 (0-88411-349-3)
Hardcover, Amereon Ltd - On the Beach: ISBN 0899683657 (0-89968-365-7)
Hardcover, Buccaneer Books - On the Beach: ISBN 0345420195 (0-345-42019-5)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group - On the Beach: ISBN 0688022235 (0-688-02223-5)
Hardcover, Harpercollins - On the Beach: ISBN 1842322761 (1-84232-276-1)
Softcover, House of Stratus Ltd
- On the Beach: ISBN 0345311485 (0-345-31148-5)
Oscar and Lucindaby Peter CareyISBN 0060915927 (0-06-091592-7)
Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Oscar and Lucinda'Book summary:Oscar Hopkins is a high-strung preacher's kid with hydrophobia and noisy knees. Lucinda Leplastrier is a frizzy-haired heiress who impulsively buys a glass factory with the inheritance forced on her by a well-intentioned adviser. In the early parts of this lushly written book, author Peter Carey renders the seminal turning points in his protagonists' childhoods as exquisite 19th-century set pieces. Young Oscar, denied the heavenly fruit of a Christmas pudding by his cruelly stern father, forever renounces his father's religion in favor of the Anglican Church. "Dear God," Oscar prays, "if it be Thy will that Thy people eat pudding, smite him!" Lucinda's childhood trauma involves a beautiful doll bought by her struggling mother with savings from the jam jar; in a misguided attempt to tame the doll's unruly curls, young Lucinda mutilates her treasure beyond repair. Neither of these coming-of-age stories quite explains how the grownup Oscar and Lucinda each develop a guilty passion for gambling. Oscar plays the horses while at school, and Lucinda, now an orphaned heiress, finds comfort in a game of cards with an odd collection of acquaintances. When the two finally meet, on board a ship bound for New South Wales, they are bound by their affinity for risk, their loneliness, and their awkwardly blossoming (but unexpressed) mutual affection. Their final high-stakes folly--transporting a crystal palace of a church across (literally) godforsaken terrain--strains plausibility, and events turn ghastly as Oscar plays out his bid for Lucinda's heart. Yet even the unconvincing plot turns are made up for by Carey's rich prose and the tale's unpredictable outcome. Although love proves to be the ultimate gamble for Oscar and Lucinda, the story never strays too far from the terrible possibility that even the most thunderstruck lovers can remain isolated in parallel lives. [via]
More editions of Oscar and Lucinda:
- Oscar and Lucinda: ISBN 0679777504 (0-679-77750-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc - Oscar and Lucinda: ISBN 0060159081 (0-06-015908-1)
Hardcover, Harpercollins - Oscar and Lucinda: ISBN 0702221163 (0-7022-2116-3)
Hardcover, University of Queensland Press - Oscar and Lucinda: ISBN 0060915927 (0-06-091592-7)
Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers
- Oscar and Lucinda: ISBN 0679777504 (0-679-77750-4)
Playing Beatie Bowby Ruth ParkISBN 0689308892 (0-689-30889-2)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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The Ridersby Tim WintonISBN 1574900366 (1-57490-036-6)
Hardcover, Thomas t Beeler
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Riders'Book summary:After traveling through Europe for two years, Scully and his wife Jennifer wind up in Ireland, and on a mystical whim of Jennifer's, buy an old farmhouse which stands in the shadow of a castle. While Scully spends weeks alone renovating the old house, Jennifer returns to Australia to liquidate their assets. When Scully arrives at Shannon Airport to pick up Jennifer and their seven-year-old daughter, Billie, it is Billie who emerges -- alone. There is no note, no explanation, not so much as a word from Jennifer, and the shock has left Billie speechless. In that instant, Scully's life falls to pieces.
The Riders is a superbly written and a darkly haunting story of a lovesick man in a vain search for a vanished woman. It is a powerfully accurate account of marriage today, of the demons that trouble relationships, of resurrection found in the will to keep going, in the refusal to hold on, to stand still. The Riders is also a moving story about the relationship between a loving man and his tough, bright daughter. [via]
More editions of The Riders:
- The Riders: ISBN 0684822776 (0-684-82277-6)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster - The Riders: ISBN 0684802961 (0-684-80296-1)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster - The Riders: ISBN 073290790X (0-7329-0790-X)
Hardcover, Pan Macmillan Publishers Australia - The Riders: ISBN 1574900366 (1-57490-036-6)
Hardcover, Thomas t Beeler
- The Riders: ISBN 0684822776 (0-684-82277-6)
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Riders in the Chariotby Patrick White, David MaloufISBN 1590170024 (1-59017-002-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Riders in the Chariot'Book summary:Patrick White's brilliant 1961 novel, set in an Australian suburb, intertwines four deeply different lives. An Aborigine artist, a Holocaust survivor, a beatific washerwoman, and a childlike heiress are each blessedand strickenwith visionary experiences that may or may not allow them to transcend the machinations of their fellow men. Tender and lacerating, pure and profane, subtle and sweeping, Riders in the Chariot is one of the Nobel Prize winner's boldest books. [via]
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Road Storyby Julienne Van LoonISBN 1741146216 (1-74114-621-6)
Softcover, Allen & Unwin
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The Secret Riverby Kate GrenvilleISBN 1841959146 (1-84195-914-6)
Softcover, Canongate Books Ltd
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Secret River'Book summary:The Orange Prize-winning author Kate Grenville recalls her family's history in an astounding novel about the pioneers of New South Wales. Already a best seller in Australia, The Secret River is the story of Grenville's ancestors, who wrested a new life from the alien terrain of Australia and its native people. London, 1806. William Thornhill, a Thames bargeman, is deported to the New South Wales colony in what would become Australia. In this new world of convicts and charlatans, Thornhill tries to pull his family into a position of power and comfort. When he rounds a bend in the Hawkesbury River and sees a gentle slope of land, he becomes determined to make the place his own. But, as uninhabited as the island appears, Australia is full of native people, and they do not take kindly to Thornhill's theft of their home.[via]
The Secret River is the tale of Thornhill's deep love for his small corner of the new world, and his slow realization that if he wants to settle there, he must ally himself with the most despicable of the white settlers, and to keep his family safe, he must permit terrifying cruelty to come to innocent people. -
Seven Types of Ambiguityby Elliot PerlmanISBN 1594481431 (1-59448-143-1)
Softcover, Riverhead Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Seven Types of Ambiguity'Book summary:Elliot Perlman has established himself as one of Australia's most perceptive and accomplished novelists with his critically-acclaimed bestselling novels Three Dollars and Seven Types of Ambiguity (which was shortlisted for Australia's top literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, alongside J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey and Shirley Hazzard), and his short story collection, The Reasons I Won't Be Coming.
Following years of unrequited love, an out-of-work schoolteacher decides to take matters into his own hands, triggering a chain of events that neither he nor his psychiatrist could have anticipated. At once a psychological thriller and a social critique, SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY is a story of obsessive love in an age of obsessive materialism. It's a story of impulse and paralysis, of empty marriages, lovers and a small boy, gambling and the market, of adult children and their parents, of poetry and prostitution, psychiatry and the law. Brimming with emotional, intellectual and moral dilemmas, this page-turning novel-reminiscent of the richest fiction of the nineteenth century in its labyrinthine complexity-unfolds at a rapid-fire pace to reveal the full extent to which these people have been affected by each other and by the insecure and uncertain times in which they live. Our times, now. [via]More editions of Seven Types of Ambiguity:
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Sixty Lightsby Gail JonesISBN 1843431963 (1-84343-196-3)
Softcover, Harvill
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sixty Lights'Book summary:In 1860 Lucy Strange and her brother Thomas are orphaned, and so begins Lucy's adolescent journey of discovery. It will take her away from her childhood home in Australia to London and Bombay and, finally, to her death, at the age of twenty-two. Lucy's is a life abbreviated, but not a life diminished. She is a remarkable character, forthright, gifted and canny. Sixty Lights is a powerful chronicle of a modern and independent young woman's life in the Victorian world. Objects evoke the past and hint at the future in a narrative that flows between pleats in time, through her observation of such objects Lucy's photographic vision is apparent. Her world is a series of still images which one day, printed on albumen paper, she will leave behind as affecting mementoes of her own extraordinary life. [via]
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The Sound of One Hand Clappingby Richard FlanaganISBN 0802137849 (0-8021-3784-9)
Softcover, Grove Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sound of One Hand Clapping'Book summary:'Flanagan's enthralling and powerful novel centres on a Slovenian couple, Bojan and Maria Buloh, and their daughter Sonja. The story begins in 1954, when Sonja is three, and ends in 1990, when she is in her late thirties ...The novel begins with Maria Buloh ...leaving the wooden hut in the Tasmanian highlands which is now her home. A blizzard is blowing, and behind Maria three-year-old Sonja cries for her to come back -- but she does not ...To understand why Maria leaves her child is to understand a little the impact of Nazi occupation on those who were scarred for the rest of their lives by what they had seen ...The novel lives by its moments of defining truth' Helen Dunmore, The Times 'Like Carol Shield's The Stone Diaries, The Sound of One Hand Clapping achieves the difficult task of making clear and real the lives of those who normally stay hidden in history. From its wonderfully atmospheric opening to its touching conclusion, this is a heartbreaking story, beautifully told' Literary Review 'Richly imagined ...told in a voice rarely heard in Australia: almost violently masculine, shot through with heartbreaking delicacy of feeling' Robert Dessaix 'Flanagan imbues this most Australian of stories with a middle European sensibility found in the reserve of characters in Milan Kundera's writings . ..[he] tells an immortal story of faith and hope, its loss and rebirth ...The Sound of One Hand Clapping is destined to be a classic' Sydney Herald Sun [via]
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Storm Boyby Colin Thiele, Robert R. IngpenISBN 1741101875 (1-74110-187-5)
Softcover, New Holland Publishers Pty, Limited
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Storm Boy 40th Anniversary Editionby Colin ThieleISBN 1864368047 (1-86436-804-7)
Softcover, New Holland Pub
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The Tax Inspectorby Peter CareyISBN 0702224243 (0-7022-2424-3)
Hardcover, University of Queensland Press
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Tirra Lirra by the Riverby Jessica AndersonISBN 0140069453 (0-14-006945-3)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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A Town Like Aliceby Nevil ShuteISBN 1842323008 (1-84232-300-8)
Softcover, House of Stratus Ltd
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Town Like Alice'Book summary:A TOWN LIKE ALICE tells of a young woman who miraculously survived a Japanese "death march" in World War II, and of an Australian soldier, also a prisoner of war, who offered to help her--even at the cost of his life.... [via]
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- A Town Like Alice: ISBN 0848808487 (0-8488-0848-7)
Hardcover, Amereon Ltd - A Town Like Alice: ISBN 0345305655 (0-345-30565-5)
Softcover, Ballantine Books - A Town Like Alice: ISBN 0345353749 (0-345-35374-9)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group - Town Like Alice: ISBN 0833583735 (0-8335-8373-5)
Hardcover, Bt Bound - Town Like Alice: ISBN 1842323008 (1-84232-300-8)
Softcover, House of Stratus Ltd
- A Town Like Alice: ISBN 0848808487 (0-8488-0848-7)
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True History of the Kelly Gangby Peter CareyISBN 0375724672 (0-375-72467-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'True History of the Kelly Gang'Book summary:Out of nineteenth-century Australia rides a hero of his people and a man for all nations, in this masterpiece by the Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs. Exhilarating, hilarious, panoramic, and immediately engrossing, it is also-at a distance of many thousand miles and more than a century-a Great American Novel.This is Ned Kelly's true confession, in his own words and written on the run for an infant daughter he has never seen. To the authorities, this son of dirt-poor Irish immigrants was a born thief and, ultimately, a cold-blooded murderer; to most other Australians, he was a scapegoat and patriot persecuted by "English" landlords and their agents.With his brothers and two friends, Kelly eluded a massive police manhunt for twenty months, living by his wits and strong heart, supplementing his bushwhacking skills with ingenious bank robberies while enjoying the support of most everyone not in uniform. He declined to flee overseas when he could, bound to win his jailed mother's freedom by any means possible, including his own surrender. In the end, however, she served out her sentence in the same Melbourne prison where, in 1880, her son was hanged.Still his country's most powerful legend, Ned Kelly is here chiefly a man in full: devoted son, loving husband, fretful father, and loyal friend, now speaking as if from the grave. With this mythic outlaw and the story of his mighty travails and exploits, and with all the force of a classic Western, Peter Carey has breathed life into a historical figure who transcends all borders and embodies tragedy, perseverance, and freedom. [via]
More editions of True History of the Kelly Gang:
- True History of the Kelly Gang: ISBN 0702231886 (0-7022-3188-6)
Softcover, University of Queensland Press - True History of the Kelly Gang: ISBN 0375410848 (0-375-41084-8)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group - True History of the Kelly Gang: ISBN 0702231673 (0-7022-3167-3)
Hardcover, University of Queensland Press - True History of the Kelly Gang: ISBN 0375724672 (0-375-72467-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
- True History of the Kelly Gang: ISBN 0702231886 (0-7022-3188-6)
The Unusual Life of Tristan Smithby Peter CareyISBN 0702226262 (0-7022-2626-2)
Hardcover, University of Queensland Press
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The Year of Living Dangerouslyby Christopher J. KochISBN 094707225X (0-947072-25-X)
Hardcover, Chivers North Amer
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Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plagueby Geraldine BrooksISBN 0783896824 (0-7838-9682-4)
Hardcover, Thorndike Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague'Book summary:Geraldine Brooks's Year of Wonders describes the 17th-century plague that is carried from London to a small Derbyshire village by an itinerant tailor. As villagers begin, one by one, to die, the rest face a choice: do they flee their village in hope of outrunning the plague or do they stay? The lord of the manor and his family pack up and leave. The rector, Michael Mompellion, argues forcefully that the villagers should stay put, isolate themselves from neighboring towns and villages, and prevent the contagion from spreading. His oratory wins the day and the village turns in on itself. Cocooned from the outside world and ravaged by the disease, its inhabitants struggle to retain their humanity in the face of the disaster. The narrator, the young widow Anna Frith, is one of the few who succeeds. With Mompellion and his wife, Elinor, she tends to the dying and battles to prevent her fellow villagers from descending into drink, violence, and superstition. All is complicated by the intense, inexpressible feelings she develops for both the rector and his wife. Year of Wonders sometimes seems anachronistic as historical fiction; Anna and Mompellion occasionally appear to be modern sensibilities unaccountably transferred to 17th-century Derbyshire. However, there is no mistaking the power of Brooks's imagination or the skill with which she constructs her story of ordinary people struggling to cope with extraordinary circumstances. --Nick Rennison, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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