Botts and her sexy, twentyish daughter, Leila, arrive. Since they're locked out of their house, Edwin invites them in-and then can't get them to leave. He becomes obsessed with Leila and convinces himself that she is a perfect surrogate mother for the childless Cecilia. "Wickedly amusing . . . subversive" (New York Times Book Review), The Sugar Mother undoes the institution of marriage.

    the occasion is a piano lesson, the first of many...

    First published in 1934, this dramatic novel covers four days following a car crash where a doctor is critically injured, and the women around him struggle with their hopes, inhibitions and knowledge.

    He takes the child on the road with him to spite his wife, but months pass and still no word comes to ask for the little girl back. Strangers to each other at first, father and daughter drift aimlessly through the dusty towns of Australia, sleeping rough and relying on odd jobs for food and money. Buster's resilience and trust slowly erode Macauley's resentment, and when he's finally able to get rid of her, he realises he can't let his shiralee go. In evocative prose that vividly conjures images of rural Australia, The Shiralee reveal an understanding of the paradoxical nature of the burdens we carry, creates a moving portrait of fatherhood, told with gruff humour and a gentle pathos.

    Out of the desert staggers a young diviner, Michael Random, offering salvation to this parched town. The once comatose community is indeed stirred to life, by hate as much as by love, and its people find salvation neither in water nor gold.

    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-...]

    From a powerful new voice in international fiction, this prize-winning collection of stories crosses the world—from Africa, London, the West Indies, and Australia—and expresses the global experience.Maxine Beneba Clarke gives voice to the disenfranchised, the lost, and the mistreated in this stunning collection of provocative and gorgeously wrought stories that will challenge you, move you, and change the way you view this complex world we inhabit.Within these pages, a desperate asylum seeker is pacing the hallways of Sydney’s notorious Villawood detention centre; a seven-year-old Sudanese boy has found solace in a patchwork bike; an enraged black militant is on the war-path through the rebel squats of 1960s Brixton; a Mississippi housewife decides to make the ultimate sacrifice to save her son from small-town ignorance; a young woman leaves rural Jamaica in search of her destiny; and an Australian schoolgirl loses her way.In the bestselling tradition of novelists such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Marlon James, this urgent, poetic, and essential work is the perfect introduction to a fresh and talented voice in international fiction.

    . . 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

    Their early intimacy binds them together once they reach Geneva and their posts at the newly created League of Nations. There, a heady idealism prevails over Edith and her young colleagues, and nothing seems beyond their grasp, certainly not world peace. The exuberance of the times carries over into Geneva nights: Edith is drawn into a glamorous and dangerous underworld where, coaxed by Ambrose, she becomes more and more sexually adventurous.Vivid, funny and wise, full of shocks of revelation and recognition, Grand Days is a dazzling evocation of a golden bygone era and an unerring portrait of a woman of her times - as well as a stunning novel which speaks vividly to readers today.

    Internationally acclaimed, Say No to Death has been translated into fourteen languages.'Dymphna Cusack... has created a number of attractive, likeable characters, given them a tragic dilemma, and moved them inexorably to a fine dramatic conclusion.' New York Times

    Daesh has a thoroughfare to the sea and China is Australia's newest ally. When a bomb goes off in remote Tasmania, Astrid Coleman agrees to return home to help her brother before an upcoming election. But this is no simple task. Her brother and sister are on either side of politics, the community is full of conspiracy theories, and her father is quoting Shakespeare. Only on Bruny does the world seem sane. Until Astrid discovers how far the government is willing to go.Bruny is a searing, subversive, brilliant novel about family, love, loyalty and the new world order.

    The epic tale of the outback Australian family, the Carmodys. The Carmodys live in the outback, travelling around, shearing, droving, making ends meet and looking for that one special place they can settle down in. Along the way, Paddy, his wife Ida, and their son, Sean, meet some of the most memorable characters in fiction. The Sundowners is a novel filled with kindness and happiness, as well as toughness and danger and is set against the magnificent backdrop of the wild, harsh and beautiful Australian landscape. In 1960 The Sundowners was turned into a film starring Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum and Peter Ustinov with a supporting cast including Chips Rafferty.

    Bojan's wife abandons him to care for their three-year-old daughter Sonja alone. Sonja returns to Tasmania 35 years later, and to a father haunted by memories of the war and other recent horrors.

    This former bank manager helped them transform three million dollars - stolen from bookies by a gang of robbers - into a rescue package for their dying town.But now the day of reckoning has come.The crims want the money.The cops want the money.A rogue insurance investigator wants the money.And so do Australia's two most notorious hit men.In trying to save his town, Lambert is forced to risk everything - his life, the lives of the town folk, his own daughter, ten thousand barramundi and a really lovable Jack Russell.

    Sybylla rejects the opportunity to marry a wealthy young man in order to maintain her independence. As a consequence she must take a job as a governess to a local family to which her father is indebted. "My Brilliant Career" is an early romantic novel by this popular Australian author.