Emotionally starved by her ramshackle family, Teresa searches for fulfilment outside her stultifying life as a working girl in a large city. Obsessed with love and sex she pins her affection on the first possible object, the egotistical Jonathan Crow, a poverty-stricken tutor who coaches her in Latin. Teresa preserves this love in the face of his indifference, contempt and ill-usage, imprisoned by her belief that ‘to love is to give for ever without stint, and not to ask for the slightest thing’. It is only through another man - her ebullient and warm-hearted employer James Quick - that Teresa comes to understand her power as a woman, and emerges from obsession to a real consciousness of sexuality and love. Set in Sydney and London, For Love Alone, first published in 1945, is one of Christina Stead’s finest novels.[Source: http://www.faber.co.uk/work/for-love-...]

    Set against the background of Australia and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book is part of a series that provides a vivid portrait of an upper middle-class family divided between the two countries yet at home in neither.

    It is a play to make us question a standard institution - Anzac Day, the sacred cow among Australian annual celebrations - but it is the likeability and genuineness of the characters that give the play its memorable qualities: Alf, the nobody who becomes a somebody on this day of days; Mum, the anchor of the family; Hughie, their son, with all the uncertainties and rebelliousness of youth; and Wacka, the Anzac, with his simple, healing wisdom.Undoubtedly one of Australia's favourite plays, the One Day of the Year explores the universal theme of father-son conflict against the background of the beery haze and the heady, nostalgic sentimentality of Anzac Day. It is a play to make us question a standard institution - Anzac Day, the sacred cow among Australian annual celebrations - but it is the likeability and genuineness of the characters that give the play its memorable qualities: Alf, the nobody who becomes a somebody on this day of days; Mum, the anchor of the family; Hughie, their son, with all the uncertainties and rebelliousness of youth; and Wacka, the Anzac, with his simple, healing wisdom.

    The only survivor is Isabella Winterbourne, who clutches a priceless gift meant for the Australian Parliament. This gift could be her ticket to a new life, free from the bonds of her husband and his overbearing family. But whom can she trust in Lighthouse Bay?Fast-forward to 2011: after losing her lover, Libby Slater leaves her life in Paris to return to her hometown of Lighthouse Bay, hoping to gain some perspective and grieve her recent loss. Libby also attempts to reconcile with her sister, Juliet, to whom she hasn’t spoken in twenty years. Libby did something so unforgivable, Juliet is unsure if she can ever trust her sister again.In these two adventurous love stories, both Isabella and Libby must learn that letting go of the past is the only way to move into the future. The answers they seek lie in Lighthouse Bay.

    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.

    The man runs an unlicensed mechanic’s workshop at the back of their property. The girl resists the man with silence, and finally with sabotage. She fights him at the place where she believes his heart lives—in the engine of the car.Set at the close of the 1970s and traversing thousands of kilometres of inland roads, Exploded View is a revelatory interrogation of Australian girlhood.Must a girl always be a part—how can she become a whole?

    Ranging over a period of some six years, the story is set during the late 1930s and early 1940s; but it is not so much a tale of this period as Herbert's analysis and indictment of the steps by which we came to the Australia of today. Herbert parallels an intimate personal narrative with a tale of approaching war and the disconnect between modern Australia and its first inhabitants. With enduring portraits of a large cast of local and international characters, Herbert paints a scene of racial, familial, and political disparity. He lays bare the paradoxes of this wild land, both old and wise, young flawed. Winner of the Miles Franklin Award on first publication in 1975, Poor Fellow, My Country is masterful storytelling, an epic in the truest sense. This is the decisive story of how Australia threw away her chance of becoming a True Commonwealth. It is undoubtedly Herbert's supreme contribution to Australian literature.

    He's thin and long-faced, like the fish he's named after. At school he's no good at sport and, at home, his father scorns him. Snook joins his father and fellow crewmen on a tuna-fishing expedition, when disaster strikes. It is up to Snook to save himself and his father from a desperate situation.

    Together, they had another child, making seven. The Captain felt it was necessary to run the family with army discipline, but his rules and regulations were no match for the fun loving children, led by the redoubtable Judy."But now it was morning, and she could disbelieve it no longer. Esther had come to her bedside and kissed her sorrowfully, her beautiful face troubled and tender. The kind-hearted stepmother had begged as she had never done before for a remission of poor Judy's sentence, but the Captain was adamant. To boarding school she must go!"

    Intrigued by Bo's claim that he holds the key to her future, Annabelle sets out with him on a path of recovery that leads back to her childhood and into the Jangga's ancient heartland, where their grandparents's lives begin to yield secrets that will challenge the possibility of their happiness together. With the consummate artistry of a novelist working at the height of his powers, Miller convinces us that the stone country is not only a remote and exotic location in North Queensland, but is also an unvisited place within each of us. Journey to the Stone Country confirms Miller's reputation as one of Australia's most intelligent and uncompromising writers."The most impressive and satisfying novel of recent years. It gave me all the kinds of pleasure a reader can hope for" - Tim Winton"A terrific tale of love and redemption that captivates from the first line." - Nicholas Shakespeare"Miller's fiction has a mystifying power that is always far more than the sum of its parts...his footsteps - softly, deftly, steadily - take you places you may not have been, and their sound resonates for a long time." - Andrea Stretton, Sydney Morning HeraldFirst Paragraph: The moment she opened the front door and stepped into the passage she knew he was gone. She stood in the silence, her heavy briefcase hanging from her hand, staring at her reflection in the bevelled mirrorglass on the hallstand. The passage smelled of fish from next door's cooking. It was raining again and the tyres going past in the road outside were making a swishing sound. A week earlier they had celebrated her forty-second birthday together at her favorite Italian restaurant in Carlton. That evening with their meal they shared a bottle of wine and then went home and made love. After making love she slept soundly and woke next morning refreshed. That day, which was a Saturday, they began planning a trip to Europe, to be undertaken in the autumn. There were conferences they would each attend, hers at Kent on Globalising History and his at Leeds on Biography as Fiction. After her conference she was to look up family connections in Somerset and they would then meet in Frankfurt and spend a week there together with his brother's family before flying home.

    But then Alison Ashley shows up, and right from the start, seems to threaten Erica's position. Can these classmates ever see past their difficulties and find friendship?

    Now it’s her final year at a wealthy Catholic high school. The nuns couldn’t be any stricter—but that doesn’t seem to stop all kinds of men from coming into her life.Caught between the old-world values of her Italian grandmother, the nononsense wisdom of her mom, and the boys who continue to mystify her, Josephine is on the ride of her life. This will be the year she falls in love, the year she discovers the secrets of her family’s past—and the year she sets herself free.Told with unmatched depth and humor, this novel—which swept the pool of Australian literary awards and became a major motion picture—is one to laugh through and cry with, to cherish and remember.

    She leaves behind the graves of her husband Joe and her baby daughter. With no money and limited options, Stella accepts her brother-in-law Harry’s offer to live at the O’Riain cane farm in the Richmond Valley. There she hopes to get answers to the questions that plague her about her marriage. However Harry refuses to discuss Joe or the family’s secrets, even forbidding her to speak to the owner of the neighbouring property.Nearly a century earlier in County Tipperary, Irish cousins Brandon and Sean O’Riain also fled their homes – as wanted criminals. By 1867, they are working as cedar-cutters in New South Wales’s lush green Richmond Valley. But while Brandon embraces the opportunities this new country offers, Sean refuses to let go of the past. And one cousin is about to make a dangerous choice that will have devastating consequences down the generations . . .

    Armed with a freshly completed manuscript, a yellow cravat and a machete, Ava strides out into the world in the hope of being published – and so the adventure begins. Despite being dismissed as an eccentric – or worse – by the world around her, and battling poverty and age, Ava’s internal world remains vivid; her purpose, clear.Author Mark O’Flynn first learned about legendary Blue Mountains writer and recluse Eve Langley when he stumbled across her abandoned hut outside the small town of Leura. Though he moved on to other projects, Langley’s voice stayed with him: ‘Why did she change her name (by deed poll) to Oscar Wilde? Why the romantic preoccupation with her past? So little is known of her final days.’ O’Flynn’s fascination with her life eventually led to the creation of the irrepressible Ava Langdon.Rich in wordplay and colourful anecdote, The Last Days of Ava Langdon is an intimate, witty and soulful conjuring of a once-great artist in her final days, which will leave the reader questioning – what passion would sustain you if everything was lost?

    Now they live in Sydney and are estranged. Each in her own way struggles with the loss of their parents.Little by little the sisters grow to understand the imaginative force of the past and the legacy of their shared orphanhood. Then Frances decides to make a journey home to the goldfields to explore what lies hidden and unspoken in their lives, in the shadowy tunnels of the past.