Book picks similar to
Collected Poems by Les Murray
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Storyland
Catherine McKinnon - 2017
Told in an unfurling narrative of interlinking stories, in a style reminiscent of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, McKinnon weaves together the stories of Will Martin together with the stories of four others: a desperate ex-convict, Hawker, who commits an act of terrible brutality; Lola, who in 1900 runs a dairy farm on the Illawarra with her brother and sister, when they come under suspicion for a crime they did not commit; Bel, a young girl who goes on a rafting adventure with her friends in 1998 and is unexpectedly caught up in violent events; and in 2033, Nada, who sees her world start to crumble apart. Intriguingly, all these characters are all connected - not only through the same land and water they inhabit over the decades, but also by tendrils of blood, history, memory and property...Compelling, thrilling and ambitious, Storyland is our story, the story of Australia. 'The land is a book waiting to be read' as one of the characters says - and this novel tells us an unforgettable and unputdownable story of our history, our present and our future.
Wombat Stew
Marcia K. Vaughan - 1984
A dingo intent on making wombat stew receives cooking suggestions from the other animals, unaware that they are protecting their fellow creature.
All Our Shimmering Skies
Trent Dalton - 2020
Darwin, 1942, and as Japanese bombs rain down, motherless Molly Hook, the gravedigger's daughter, turns once again to the sky for guidance. She carries a stone heart inside a duffel bag next to the map that leads to Longcoat Bob, the deep-country sorcerer who put a curse on her family. By her side are the most unlikely travelling companions: Greta, a razor-tongued actress and Yukio, a fallen Japanese fighter pilot. Run, Molly, run, says the daytime sky. Run to the vine forests. Run to northern Australia's wild and magical monsoon lands. Run to friendship. Run to love. Run. Because the graverobber's coming, Molly, and the night-time sky is coming with him. So run, Molly, run.All Our Shimmering Skies is a story about gifts that fall from the sky, curses we dig from the earth and the secrets we bury inside ourselves. It is an odyssey of true love and grave danger, of darkness and light, of bones and blue skies; a buoyant, beautiful and magical novel abrim with warmth, wit and wonder; and a love letter to Australia and the art of looking up.
Gravity Well
Melanie Joosten - 2017
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.
Blakwork
Alison Whittaker - 2018
Alison Whittaker’s BLAKWORK is an original and unapologetic collection from which two things emerge; an incomprehensible loss, and the poet’s fearless examination of the present.Whittaker is unsparing in the interrogation of familiar ideas – identifying and dissolving them with idiosyncratic imagery, layering them to form new connections, and reinterpreting what we know.
Skylarking
Kate Mildenhall - 2016
As daughters of the lighthouse keepers, the two girls share everything, until a fisherman, McPhail, arrives in their small community. When Kate witnesses the desire that flares between him and Harriet, she is torn by her feelings of envy and longing. But one moment in McPhail’s hut will change the course of their lives forever. Inspired by a true story, Skylarking is a stunning debut novel about friendship, love and loss, one that questions what it is to remember and how tempting it can be to forget.‘Kate Mildenhall’s impressive debut novel takes an historical case and re-imagines it with such sensitivity and insight that we feel this must be how it truly happened.’ —Emily Bitto
Tarcutta Wake, Stories
Josephine Rowe - 2012
Two photographers document a nation’s guilt in pictures of its people’s hands. An underground club in Western Australia plays jazz to nostalgic patrons dreaming of America’s Deep South. A young woman struggles to define herself among the litter of objects an ex-lover has left behind. In short vignettes and longer stories, Josephine Rowe explores the idea of things that are left behind: souvenirs, scars, and prejudice. Rowe captures everyday life in restrained poetic prose, merging themes of collective memory and guilt, permanence and impermanence, and inherited beliefs. These beautifully wrought, bittersweet stories announce the arrival of an exciting new talent in Australian fiction.
A Stolen Season
Rodney Hall - 2018
. . 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
Nil Nil
Don Paterson - 1995
The book presented a new and urgent poetry of dream-life, mystery and music, sexual obsession and the consolations of drink - all delivered with great formal skill and imaginative daring.'One of the finest first books of poems I've read for ages.' Paul Muldoon'If you are wondering whether great poems are still being written, you ought to read Don Paterson's.' Charles Simic'One of the most ferociously talented of all British poets.' Catherine Lockerbie
Bittersweet
Melanie La'Brooy - 2010
Her life is glamorous and seemingly perfect – apart from her recurring desire to run away.Her younger sister Mimi is funny and bright but also hopelessly lost, with no career prospects, no money, no love life and a string of disastrous mistakes in her past, all of which seem to be curiously linked.Returning from overseas, Mimi is forced into a reluctant reconciliation with her estranged sister when Sabrina hires Mimi to be her bridesmaid. The sisters then join forces to do battle with intrusive paparazzi, out-of-control dress designers and, occasionally, with each other ...
Grand Days
Frank Moorhouse - 1993
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.
The Complete Poems
Randall Jarrell - 1981
His poetry, whether dealing with art, war, memories of childhood, or the loneliness of everyday life, is powerful and moving. A poet of colloquial language, ample generosity, and intimacy, Jarrell wrote beautifully "of the American landscape," as James Atlas noted in American Poetry Review, "[with] a broad humanism that enabled him to give voice to those had been given none of their own."The Complete Poems is the definitive volume of Randall Jarrell's verse, including Selected Poems (1955), with notes by the author; The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; and The Lost World (1965), "his last and best book," according to Robert Lowell. This volume also brings together several of Jarrell's uncollected or posthumously published poems as well as his Rilke translations.
Hating Alison Ashley
Robin Klein - 1984
But then Alison Ashley shows up, and right from the start, seems to threaten Erica's position. Can these classmates ever see past their difficulties and find friendship?