. . veteran of the Iraq conflict who has suffered such extensive bodily trauma that he can only really survive by means of a mechanical skeleton.Marianna's has been ruined by men . . . A woman who has had to flee the country after her husband lied to the wrong people.John Philip's by too much money . . . Until he receives a surprise inheritance in the evening of his own life.Rodney Hall, two-times winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, presents the story of three people experiencing a period of life they never thought possible, and, perhaps, should never have been granted at all...PRAISE FOR RODNEY HALL"Reminiscent of both Joyce and Garcia Marquez" Washington Post"Magnificent. So good that you wish you had written it yourself" Salman Rushdie"A wondrous blend of the fabulous and the surreal" The Australian"Brilliant" David Mitchell

    When Stellanuova's inhabitants emigrate to Australia in the post World War II migrations of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, the immortal saint is left looking down on an abandoned town. To fulfil his calling, he decides in heaven to migrate with his countrymen and now looks down on the state of Victoria, where he intercedes in matters relating to eels.In the southern Victorian town of Mangowak, Noel Lea lives with the melancholy inheritance of a place undergoing the gentrifications of contemporary Australia. Along with his oldest friend, Nanette Burns, he longs for a time when life was less complex and unexpected magic seemed to permeate the ocean town and its people. When spring rains flood a nearby swamp and hundreds of eels get trapped in the grassy ditches around Noel's family home, he and Nanette encounter the vibrant Fra Ionio and get more magic than they bargained for.A beautifully written, charming and evocative book by Gregory Day, who also authored Trace , in collaboration with photographer, Robert Ashton.

    Something she always thought of as a fairy tale. A fairy tale with a dark side, like the best of fairy tales...Occupied France, 1943. France's most shameful hour. In these dark times, Dominique starts an illicit affair with a distinguished publisher, a married man. He introduces her to the Resistance, and she comes to have a taste for the clandestine life - she has never felt more alive. Shortly after the war, to prove something to her lover, she writes an erotic novel about surrender, submission and shame. Never meant to be published, Story of O becomes a national scandal and success, the world's most famous erotic novel. But what is the story really about - Dominique, her lover, or the country and the wartime past it would rather forget?

    Once there, and living in a run-down apartment block called Cairo, he is befriended by an eccentric musician Max Cheever, his beautiful wife Sally, and their close-knit circle of painters and poets. Tom is delighted at his new life, but his charismatic older friends aren’t quite what they appear to be. As he falls increasingly under their sway, Tom enters a bohemian world of parties and gallery openings, but also of more sinister events involving murder, deception and betrayal, not to mention one of the greatest unsolved art heists of the twentieth century: the infamous theft of Picasso’s *Weeping Woman*. Set among the demimonde — where nothing and nobody is as they seem — *Cairo* is a novel about growing up, the perils of first love, and finding one’s true place in the world.

    These tender, subtle, and intimate stories give us men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, puzzling over not only their own lives but also the place they have come to occupy in the lives of others.Heartbreakingly beautiful, richly satisfying, The Complete Stories also includes David Malouf’s short fiction from Dream Stuff, Antipodes, and Child’s Play. It is a major literary event.

    There are two stories here.Hannah Mulvey left her island home as a teenager. But her stubborn, defiant mother is dying, and now Hannah has returned to Chesil, taking up a teaching post at the tiny schoolhouse, doing what she can in the long days of this final year.But though Hannah cannot pinpoint exactly when it begins, something threatens her small community. A girl disappears entirely from class. Odd reports and rumours reach her through her young charges. People mutter on street corners, the church bell tolls through the night and the island's women gather at strange hours...And then the miracles begin.A page-turning, thought-provoking portrayal of a remote community caught up in a collective moment of madness, of good intentions turned terribly awry. A blistering examination of truth and power, and how we might tell one from the other.'Catherine Noske's debut novel grapples with questions of familial obligation, complicity, remorse and the fallibility of memory...The Salt Madonna will appeal to readers who enjoyed Laura Elizabeth Woollett's Beautiful Revolutionary.' Books+Publishing'Catherine Noske's The Salt Madonna is Australian Gothic at its most sublime and uncanny. Superbly atmospheric and darkly unsettling, the characters are haunted by their colonial pasts, manifested in guilty silence...Noske's taut, subversive writing exposes unspeakable truths buried in dazzling stories, miracles and epiphanies.' Cassandra Atherton

    Celebrated as a novelist in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Philip Roth, Elliot Perlman writes of impulse and paralysis, empty marriages, lovers, gambling, and the stock market; of adult children and their parents; of poetry and prostitution, psychiatry and the law. Comic, poetic, and full of satiric insight, Seven Types of Ambiguity is, above all, a deeply romantic novel that speaks with unforgettable force about the redemptive power of love.The story is told in seven parts, by six different narrators, whose lives are entangled in unexpected ways. 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. Brimming with emotional, intellectual, and moral dilemmas, this 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 one another and by the insecure and uncertain times in which they live. Our times, now.

    She meets an Australian musician, Mishka, and from the moment she first hears him play his music grips her; they quickly become lovers. Then one day Leela is picked up off the street and taken to an interrogation center somewhere outside the city. There has been an explosion in the subway; terrorism is suspected. The interrogator—an old childhood friend—now reveals to her that Mishka may not be all he seems. In this compelling reimagining of the Orpheus story, Leela travels into an underworld of kidnapping, torture, and despair in search of her lover. Janette Turner Hospital, whose works are "richly imbued with a highly lyrical and luminous quality" (San Diego Union-Tribune) again shows her genius, interweaving a literary thriller with a story of passion and the triumph of decency in confusing and dangerous times.

    And lay in the dark, open-mouthed, holding my breath. That feeling ... that feeling was indescribable. For a moment I had felt as if I were falling ... falling into bliss.”All his life, Richard Kline has been haunted by a sense that something is lacking. He envies the ease with which some people slip – seemingly unquestioningly – into contented suburban life or the pursuit of wealth.As he moves into middle age, Richard grows increasingly angry. But then a strange event awakens him to a different way of living. He finds himself on a quest, almost against his own will, to resolve the 'divine discontent' he has suffered since childhood. From pharmaceuticals to new age therapies and finding a guru, Richard's journey dramatises the search for meaning in today's world.This moving and audacious novel is a pilgrim's progress for the here and now. Suffused with yearning and a sense of the mystical, this extraordinary novel is one of Lohrey's finest offerings yet.

    "Just this one thing." It was as though I had smashed the Ten Commandments."Oh father," I cried, grovelling at his ankles while my mother and siblings looked on. "The one thing you asked of me—is everything."Bani Adam has known all his life what was expected of him. To marry the right kind of girl. To make the House of Adam proud.But Bani wanted more than this—he wanted to make his own choices. Being the first in his Australian Muslim family to go to university, he could see a different way.Years later, Bani will write his story to his son, Kahlil. Telling him of the choices that were made on Bani's behalf and those that he made for himself. Of the hurt he caused and the heartache he carries. Of the mistakes he made and the lessons he learned.In this moving and timely novel, Michael Mohammed Ahmad balances the complexities of modern love with the demands of family, tradition and faith. The Other Half of You is the powerful, insightful and unforgettable new novel from the Miles Franklin shortlisted author of The Lebs.

    Set within Australia's lush rain forest at the height of the rainy season, Salt Rain is an absorbing debut about sifting through the complicated stories that shape us, and ultimately reclaiming them as our own.

    Grey prays that his mother will be returned to him in some form, so he might protect her from the world as his father did not. This prayer, Grey believes is answered in his sister Irene. He becomes obsessed with protecting her purity and innocence.Also with his mother gone and his father turned to drink, Grey begins running with the wild boys, horse-handlers and fox hunters and part-time timber workers - members of a small, vanishing tribe who find themselves caught between an old relationship with place and a new one that is exemplified by the highway that threatens their town. A rash gamble by Grey and Irene's broken father means he and the Mary Smokes boys must steal horses to ensure Irene's safety. The consequences seem set to fall on Greys' closest friend, Ook' Eccleston. As Grey's, Eccleston's and Irene's lives are put at stake his allegiances falter and the world of Mary Smokes slips into a heightened state of darkness and threat.With the passion of Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights and the distilled beauty of Ondaatje Patrick Holland captures the fragility and grace of small town life and how one fateful moment can forever alter the course of our lives.

    When she returns to her hometown after years in South America, reeling from a devastating diagnosis, she finds that much has changed. Lotte’s father has remarried, and she feels like an outsider in the house she grew up in. She’s estranged from her former best friend, Eve, who is busy with her own life, and unsure of how to recover the closeness they once shared. Initially, Lotte's return causes disharmony, but then it is the catalyst for a much more devastating event — an event that will change Lotte and Eve's lives forever.If families are like solar systems — bodies that orbit in time with one another, sometimes close and sometimes far away — what is the force that drives them? And what are the consequences when the weight of one planet tugs others off course?The long-awaited second novel from the award-winning Melanie Joosten, 'Gravity Well' is a striking and tender tale of friendship and family: both the family we are born to, and the family we choose. Deeply compassionate and profoundly moving, it is a heartrending portrait of how we rebuild when the worst has happened.

    From his early years in the Netherlands to growing up in Australia during the 1980s, Michael recalls the secret surrounding his estranged Greek father and how scandalous events from the past fractured his family. This is a moving chronicle of a boy’s turbulent relationship with his bullying stepfather, aloof older brother and adored mother, whose cheerful apathy has devastating consequences. As his life unfolds, Michael – now a father – must decide if he can free himself from the dark pull of the past.Reminiscent of the great autobiographical novels of JM Coetzee and Michael Ondaatje, The Last Thread is a beautifully crafted work from an exceptional new writer.

    But Tess senses she's at a hinge moment, poised between the life she thought she wanted and the one she long ago decided against. The demands of her Sydney family seem unrelenting: an uneasy teenage daughter, a father who has just been placed in care, the impending sale of her childhood home. Sent to London for a conference, she's unable to resist the pull of that relinquished life. What, she wonders, would it be like now? And might it have suited her better after all?Deceptively concise, moving, elegant, The Girl with the Dogs was published online in 2014 under the title of Everything Precious.