Richard Mahony, despite finding initial contentment with his wife Mary, becomes increasingly dissatified with his ordered life. His restlessness is not understood by Mary, who has to endure the constant shattering of her security as Richard desperately attempts to free himself; his attempts finally plunge them into poverty. In the figure of Richard Mahony, Richardson captures the soul of the emigrant, ever restless, ever searching for some equilibrium, yet never really able to settle anywhere. Richard’s search, though, is also the more universal one for a meaning that will validate and give purpose to his existence.

    But when the handsome John Beck-a former Methodist preacher turned novice whaler with a mysterious past-arrives at the Davidson's door pleading to join her father's crews, suddenly Mary's world is upended.As her family struggles to survive the scarcity of whales and the vagaries of weather, and as she navigates sibling rivalries and an all-consuming first love for the newcomer John, nineteen-year-old Mary will soon discover a darker side to these men who hunt the seas, and the truth of her place among them. Swinging from Mary's own hopes and disappointments to the challenges that have beset her family's whaling operation, RUSH OH! is an enchanting blend of fact and fiction that's as much the story of its gutsy narrator's coming-of-age as it is the celebration of an extraordinary episode in history.

    She has resigned from her job, and is trying to survive as a writer. With no food left in her rooming-house attic, she sets out to buy provisions from the corner shop. On the way she collapses, and to her surprise wakes up in hospital... From there it's a bumpy ride to the tuberculosis sanatorium, where Isobel becomes a member of a self-contained society. The god-like doctors and an assorted, less than compatible, cast of patients help Isobel to gain hard insights about herself, and about human nature, on the slow path to recuperation. While many of the experiences recounted in this memorable novel are grim, Amy Witting manages at the same time to be continually and compassionately funny. From her humour emerges the profound, ironic wisdom by which all her writing is distiguished.

    A woman grapples with survivor’s guilt after a body is found in her garden bed; an ageing beauty queen contemplates her past; a world champion free-diver disappears during routine training...In moments disquieting or quietly inspiring, this collection considers the complexity of the connections we make—with our family, friends and neighbours, and with those met briefly or never at all.In her timely debut, Emily Paull voices a chorus of characters that reveal and re-evaluate the expectations of women in Australia today—after all, well-behaved women rarely make history.

    Was it his family, their clumsy ambivalent love? Was it a curse, the bitter crow that has been following the Stefano men for generations? Was it losing his job, or did God make him do it? Did pornography, did television? Trying to find some answers in his brother's death, Lou Stefano goes on a pilgrimage into the past, into the depths of his own desire, shame and confusion. But what if there are no answers? No reasons why we do what we do, love who we love? Then maybe the best Lou can hope for is to lay some ghosts to rest. A novel of rare electric brilliance explodes into the consciousness with a dazzling visceral power.

    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.

    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.

    After two years in Europe they are finally settling down. He sees a new life before them, a stable outlook, and a cottage in the Irish countryside that he's renovated by hand. He's waited, sweated on this reunion. He does not like to be alone - he's that kind of man. The flight lands, the glass doors hiss open, and Scully's life begins to go down in flames.

    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.

    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?

    Both the book and the film have achieved a cult status as the Australian answer to US and UK novels and films of 1960s youthful alienation. It is the gruelling story of a young Australian schoolteacher on his way back from the outback to Sydney and civilization when things start to go wrong. He finds himself stuck overnight in Bundanyabba, a rough outback mining town. An ill-advised and drink-fuelled visit to a gambling den leaves Grant broke and he realizes he has no way of escaping. He descends into a cycle of hangovers, fumbling sexual encounters, and increasing self-loathing as he becomes more and more immersed in the grotesque and surreal nightmare that his life has become.

    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.

    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.

    Aldo, his best friend and muse, is a haplessly criminal entrepreneur with an uncanny knack for disaster. As Aldo's luck worsens, Liam is inspired to base his next book on his best friend's exponential misfortunes and hopeless quest to win back his one great love: his ex-wife, Stella. What begins as an attempt to make sense of Aldo's mishaps spirals into a profound story of faith and friendship.With the same originality and buoyancy that catapulted his first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, onto prize lists around the world—including shortlists for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award—Steve Toltz has created a rousing, hysterically funny but unapologetically dark satire about fate, faith, friendship, and the artist's obligation to his muse. Sharp, witty, kinetic, and utterly engrossing, Quicksand is a subversive portrait of twenty-first-century society in all its hypocrisy and absurdity.