Perhaps what you are facing is yourself.Sixteen-year-old Stephanie West has been dragged from Sydney to remote Maatsuyker Island off the coast of Tasmania by her parents, hoping to recapture a childhood idyll and come to terms with their grief over the death of Steph's twin brother. Cut off from friends and the comforts of home, exiled to a lonely fortress and a lighthouse that bears the brunt of savage storms, the months ahead look to be filled with ghosts of the past.Steph's saviour is Tom Forrest, a 19-year-old deckhand aboard a crayfishing boat. When the weather allows, Tom visits the island, and he and Steph soon form an attraction. But Tom must conceal at all costs the illegal fishing he takes part in, orchestrated by his tyrannical brother. And he dare not dwell on his fear of the sea or his deep-worn premonition that the ocean will one day take him.Wildlight is an exquisite, vividly detailed exploration of the wayward journey of adolescence, and how the intense experience of a place can change the course of even the most well-planned life.PRAISE FOR WILDLIGHT"There is much to admire in Wildlight: the skilful unravelling of the overriding mystery and the spectacular location given life. Mundy offers compelling answers to the dramatic tension she creates, even if she leaves us curious about why." The Australian"Wildlight could easily be devoured in a weekend and leaves one with a longing to escape the city and explore Australia's natural wilderness. It is a beautifully crafted story about love, human personas, remembering the past, and finding peace." NSW Writers' Centre

    It took two years of juvie, a crazy mother and a porn stash for them to meet again.Sonny is a sixteen-year-old girl who watches the world from her bedroom window and has a habit of falling hopelessly in love with just about anyone. Vince is a sixteen-year-old boy who became a legend after he was taken away two years ago. Now, Vince is back. In the vertigo of 1990's Cabramatta, in households which harbour histories and parents who are difficult to love, they stumble upon each other once more.

    And while the Indigenous tourism industry continues to grow, no comprehensive travel guide is currently available.Marcia Langton: Welcome to Country is a curated guidebook to Indigenous Australia and the Torres Strait Islands. Author Professor Marcia Langton offers fascinating insights into Indigenous languages and customs, history, native title, art and dance, storytelling, and cultural awareness and etiquette for visitors. There is also a directory of Indigenous tourism experiences, organised by state or territory, covering galleries and festivals, national parks and museums, communities that are open to visitors, as well as tours and performances.This book is essential for anyone travelling around Australia who wants to learn more about the culture that has thrived here for over 50,000 years. It also offers the chance to enjoy tourism opportunities that will show you a different side of this fascinating country — one that remains dynamic, and is filled with openness and diversity.

    It is a thinly veiled description of the rise to power of real life figure John Wren (in the book 'John West').Some other people alluded to in the book include Tommy Bent, Sir Samuel Gillott, the gangster Squizzy Taylor and Archbishop Daniel Mannix. In the history of Australian literature few books have been so controversial than Frank Hardy's Power Without Glory.This is a tale of corruption stretching from street corner SP bookmaking to the most influential men in the land - and the terrible personal cost of the power such corruption brings. John West rose from a Melbourne slum to dominate Australian politics with bribery, brutality and fear. His attractive wife and their children turned away from him in horror. Friends dropped away. At the peak of his power, surrounded by bootlickers, West faced a hate-filled nation - and the terrible loneliness of his life.Was John West a real figure? For months during the post-war years, an Australian court heard evidence in a sensational libel action brought by businessman John Wren's wife. After a national uproar which rocked the very foundations of the Commonwealth, Frank Hardy was acquitted. This is the novel which provoked such intense uproar and debate across the nation. The questions it poses remain unanswered

    Its publication in 1965 marked a unique literary event, for this was the first novel by any writer of Aboriginal blood to be published in Australia. As well, it is a remarkable piece of literature in its own right, expressing the dilemmas and conflicts of the young Aboriginal in modern Australian society with its memorable insight and stylishness.

    but the war isn't over.For Ellie Linton, being back on the farm with her parents is what makes the terrible things that happened during the war -- the things she, Homer, Lee, Fi, and the others had to do -- all worthwhile. It's where she belongs.But the war won't let her go. A devastating tragedy has shattered any hope she ever had to reclaim her life, or herself. It's a new kind of fight. And the enemy isn't always from the other side of the border.Another spectacular novel of war and its consequences by bestselling author John Marsden.

    Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality. This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.

    She expected a young student not a middle-aged bookseller whose marriage has fallen apart. But Trevor is attracted to Elizabeth's house because of the empty shed in her backyard, the perfect space for him to revive the artistic career he abandoned years earlier. The face-blind, EH Holden-driving Elizabeth is a solitary and feisty book editor, and she accepts him, on probation...Miles Franklin finalist Philip Salom has a gift for depicting the inner states of his characters with empathy and insight. In this poignant yet upbeat novel the past keeps returning in the most unexpected ways. Elizabeth is at the beck and call of her ageing mother, and the associated memories of her childhood in a Rajneesh community. Trevor's Polish father disappeared when Trevor was fifteen, and his mother died not knowing whether he was dead or alive. The authorities have declared him dead, but is he?The Returns is a story about the eccentricities, failings and small triumphs that humans are capable of, a novel that pokes fun at literary and artistic pretensions, while celebrating the expansiveness of art, kindness and friendship.

    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.

    She's a reluctant member of a musical family with a legendary father, an impossible mother, a sister who can't keep still and a brother who walks to his own beat.Albert Flowers is a people person, life rushing at him from all corners, carrying him to weddings and parties and late nights in rooftop bars.Florence and Albert work together, they plant dreams in the forest together. They think they know each other.But, somewhere between who they are, and who people think they are, lies The Best Kind of Beautiful.

    The Thylacine, creature of fable and fear, is thought still to be found out there in the wilderness, and this man must find it. In richly crafted prose, first-time novelist Julia Leigh creates an unforgettable picture of a damp, dangerous landscape and a man obsessed by an almost mythical creature.

    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.

    In this lyrical, bittersweet debut memoir & already an award- winning bestseller when it was published in Australia & Alice grows up straddling two worlds, East and West, her insular family and the Australia outside. With wisdom beyond her years and a keen eye for comedy in everyday life, she writes of the trials of assimilation and cultural misunderstanding, and of the tender but fraught relationships between three generations of women trying to live the Australian dream without losing themselves. Unpolished Gem is a moving, vivid journey about identity and the ultimate search for acceptance and healing, delivered by a writer possessed of rare empathy, penetrating insight, and undeniable narrative gifts.

    It goes down into the guts of the world. But a child’s love for a parent is different. It goes up. It’s more ethereal. It’s not quite present on the earth.’In present-day Melbourne, a man attempts to piece together the mystery of his father’s apparent suicide, as his young family slowly implodes. At the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, in 1976, a man searching for salvation must confront his capacity for violence and darkness. And in a not-too-distant future, a woman with a life-altering decision to make travels through a climate-ravaged landscape to visit her estranged father.In Moonland is a portrait of three generations, each grappling with their own mortality. Spanning the wild idealism of the 70s through to the fragile hope of the future, it is a novel about the struggle for transcendence and the reverberating effects of family bonds. This long-awaited second outing from Miles Allinson, the multi-award-winning author of Fever of Animals, will affirm his reputation as one of Australia’s most interesting contemporary fiction writers, and urge us to see our own political and environmental reality in a new light.

    Join Clara at the rat pit. Relax with Mr Bodley as he is lulled to sleep by Mrs Tremain and her girls. Find out what became of Sophie.Michel Faber revisits the world of his bestselling novel The Crimson Petal and the White, conjuring tantalising glimpses of its characters, their lives before we first met them and their intriguing futures. You'll be desperate for more by the time you reluctantly re-emerge into the twenty-first century.