It is not hard to see why Mark Dapin’s stylish novel, set in Nineties Sydney, was such a critical success in Australia. The writing has real freshness and, apart from the odd hiccup, the story glides effortlessly from an intriguing start to a heart-warming resolution.David, who narrates, is a bright 13 year-old from Sydney whose parents have just split up. While his father gets his jollies with the “Woman in White”, and his mother experiences teething problems with the “Dark Man”, David is parked on his Jewish grandmother and her eccentric husband Jimmy, a war veteran haunted by his experiences in south-east Asia during the Second World War. It is an education in life that makes the classroom seem very dull.Jimmy and his grizzled Jewish cronies – Solomon the tailor, Myer the optician and Ernie the former war artist – are worth the cover price of the book in their own right, wisecracking their way non-stop through the day, as if to avoid dwelling on the horrors of the past. “Ernie is an aesthete,” Solomon explains to David. “That means he doesn’t believe in God.” “You’re thinking of an anaesthetist,” says Myer. Without emotional ballast, the friends’ badinage would quickly pall; but there is ballast aplenty in the harrowing stories of the war, which David coaxes out of his initially reluctant grandfather.The descriptions of life in Japanese captivity are beautifully done. Accounts of brutal beatings pull no punches, but there is also room for tenderness and humour. One of the strongest strands features Townsville Jack, a cussed so-and-so who is damned if he is going to let the war stop him organising frog-racing and other entertainments. He is a figure built on such a heroic scale that his downfall, when it comes, has tragic resonance.The spirit house of the title is an altar that Jimmy erects in his Bondi bungalow, with help from David, as his way of laying to rest the ghosts of the past. It does just that, bringing acceptance after years of troubled nights. As he does throughout the book, Dapin impresses with the understated authority of his storytelling.

    There he must deal with both the bullying of the other boys and the intense affection of Penworth, one of the masters. But then, home for the holidays, he meets Margaret, a girl staying at a nearby farm, and a passionate bond develops between them. Published in 1937 to extraordinary acclaim when Kenneth Mackenzie was in his early twenties, The Young Desire It is an unparalleled account of erotic awakening.‘Among Australian novels it is unique and very nearly perfect, a hymn to youth, to life, to sexual freedom and moral independence.’ David Malouf

    Soon they're the parents of three young children.Initially, the kids keep them together until love turns to lies and the family implodes. As they become adults, each child faces love and loss in the shadow of their family legacy.You Belong Here is a book about trust and connection. About what keeps us going in spite of ourselves. About a place where we belong.

    Politician Dan LeRoi, Chairman of the Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, has been shot. Four bullets to the head. The crime scene is chaotic. Homicide. Counter Terrorism. Media. And for Sid, hunting the killer is going to get complicated.Journalist Zephyr Wilde is complicated. She's tenacious and she's got Sid's number. Sid knows the gossip: how Zephyr's mother was murdered when Zephyr was a kid. He doesn't know that Zephyr is still getting letters from her long-dead mother. But when he learns that Dan LeRoi was helping Zephyr look into her mother's death, he realises that lines are going to be crossed. A cop should not be talking to a journalist.As they both ask too many questions, Sid and Zephyr stir up a hornet's nest of corruption. Knowing who to trust is going to mean the difference between solving a crime and being a victim. The question is, which side will they end up on.

    Norah's prim and proper aunts, who live in the city, consider she is in danger of "growing up wild" - riding all over Billabong on her beloved pony, Bobs, helping with mustering, and joining in all the holidays fun when Jim and his friends come home from boarding school. A fishing trip results in unexpected drama when they discover a mysterious stranger camped in the bush. Who is this stranger and why is he there? Norah's resourcefulness is tested to the full!

    Once the land is cleared and a rudimentary house built, he brings his wife Amy to the wilderness. Together they face lives of joy and sorrow as they struggle against the environment.

    The bouncers and bosses terrify him, he’s desperately in love with a much younger Greek waitress, and to make matters worse his mother has come to stay with him.Then a dead body turns up. He and his best mate, Dave, will have to do something about it, and fast—or it’s goodnight, Carl.With a new introduction by Shane Maloney, author of the Murray Whelan crime thrillers and head honcho of the Brunswick Institute.

    But before Meg can take her first steps into the unknown alone, she must look to her past. Why, she wonders, did her mother wear a wedding ring but never marry? Why, for instance, does the tallyman never call at No. 3 Tippet's Yard to collect any rent? He does everywhere else. With Ma gone, Meg must go back to her roots to uncover her 'family tree'. However, the process of simplfying her life leads to unforseen complications. But there's always Kip, reliable and loving, to pick up the pieces of her unsolved life and love.

    

    If a man can still ride, if he hasn't totally lost the use of his legs, if he hasn't died to the part of his heart that understands such things, then he should go for a gallop. At the very least he should stand at the road by the river imagining that he's pushing a horse up the steep hill that leads to the house on the farm once known as One Tree.

    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 . . .

    From one of Australia's most loved novelists. He felt like a pirate landing on an island of little maimed animals. A great wave had swept them up and dumped them here. All of them, like him, stranded, wanting to go home. It is 1954 and thirteen-year-old Frank Gold, refugee from wartime Hungary, is learning to walk again after contracting polio in Australia. At the Golden Age Children's Polio Convalescent Hospital in Perth, he sees Elsa, a fellow-patient, and they form a forbidden, passionate bond. The Golden Age becomes the little world that reflects the larger one, where everything occurs, love and desire, music, death, and poetry. Where children must learn that they are alone, even within their families. Written in Joan London's customary clear-eyed prose, The Golden Age evokes a time past and a yearning for deep connection. It is a rare and precious gem of a book from one of Australia's finest novelists.

    Based on the wartime diaries of the author’s father, the novel tells the story of Tholdi, a 16-year-old Jewish boy living in Czernowitz—now known as Chernivtsi in Ukraine—during WWII. Tholdi is a musical prodigy who wants to become a conductor, but the year is 1941, and he and his family are forced into the Czernowitz ghetto. After two weeks in appalling conditions, they manage to bribe their way out as ‘skilled Jews’ and Tholdi gets a job at a weaving mill. However, before long he learns that the two brothers in charge are Nazi collaborators who are receiving a hefty commission for herding Jews onto trains bound for the concentration camps of Transnistria. Thanks to a chance encounter with a Romanian ‘gypsy’, Tholdi devises a way to save himself and his family—but it comes at a cost, especially to his integrity. This book is a fascinating retelling of true events, painting a vivid picture of Czernowitz and what is often called the forgotten Holocaust in Transnistria. Rick Held’s experience as a television screenwriter and editor shows in the fast pacing of the narrative, which will also appeal to anyone who enjoys well-developed historical writing.

    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

    He wrote many ballads and poems about Australian life, focusing particularly on the rural and outback areas, including the district around Binalong, New South Wales where he spent much of his childhood. Paterson's more notable poems include Waltzing Matilda (1895), The Man from Snowy River (1890) and Clancy of the Overflow (1889). In 1885, Paterson began submitting and having his poetry published in the Sydney edition of The Bulletin under the pseudonym of "The Banjo," the name of a favourite horse. Paterson, like The Bulletin, was an ardent nationalist, and in 1889 published a pamphlet, Australia for the Australians. In 1890, he wrote The Man from Snowy River, a poem which caught the heart of the nation, and in 1895 had a collection of his works published under that name. Paterson authored two novels; An Outback Marriage (1906) and The Shearer's Colt (1936), wrote many short stories; Three Elephant Power and Other Stories (1917), and wrote a book based on his experiences as a war reporter; Happy Dispatches (1934).