The Broken Shore


Peter Temple - 2005
    He lives a quiet life with his two dogs in the tumbledown wreck his family home has become. It's a peaceful existence - ideal for the rehabilitating man. But his recovery is rudely interrupted by a brutal attack on Charles Bourgoyne, a prominent member of the local community. Suspicion falls on three young men from the local Aboriginal community. But Cashin's not so sure and as the case unfolds amid simmering corruption and prejudice, he finds himself holding on to something that it might be better to let go.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and other Classic Novels


Jules Verne - 2012
    This book collects six of Verne's best-known novels that extrapolate developing technology and scientific inquisitiveness into rousing adventures.Five weeks in a balloon --Journey to the center of the earth --From the earth to the moon --Round the moon --Twenty thousand leagues under the sea --Around the world in eighty days.

Moll Flanders


Daniel Defoe - 1722
    It purports to be the true account of the life of the eponymous Moll, detailing her exploits from birth until old age.By 1721, Defoe had become a recognised novelist, with the success of Robinson Crusoe in 1719. His political work was tapering off at this point, due to the fall of both Whig and Tory party leaders with whom he had been associated (Robert Walpole was beginning his rise). Defoe was never fully at home with the Walpole group. Defoe's Whig views are nevertheless evident in the story of Moll. The novel's full title gives some insight into this and the outline of the plot: "The Fortunes & Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, & during a Life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, & died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums."

The Service of Clouds


Delia Falconer - 1997
    In 1907, in a village full of eccentric characters in Australia's Blue Mountains, a young pharmacist's assistant named Eureka Jones falls in love with a landscape photographer and mystic called Harry Kitchings.

Puberty Blues


Kathy Lette - 1979
    It also marked the starting point of Kathy Lette's writing career, which sees her now as an author at the forefront of her field.Puberty Blues is about top chicks and surfie spunks and the kids who don't quite make the cut: it recreates with fascinating honesty a world where only the gang and the surf count. It's a hilarious and horrifying account of the way many teenagers live and some of them die. Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey's insightful novel is as painfully true today as it ever was.

A Bid for Fortune or Dr Nikola's Vendetta


Guy Newell Boothby - 1895
    He can cause ordinary men to see images in pools of liquid, and prophesy into the future. It's said that he knows the hour, moment, and method of his own demise.

Bulfinch's Mythology


Thomas Bulfinch - 1855
            The stories are divided into three sections: The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes (first published in 1855); The Age of Chivalry (1858), which contains King Arthur and His Knights, The Mabinogeon, and The Knights of English History; and Legends of Charlemagne or Romance of the Middle Ages (1863). For the Greek myths, Bulfinch drew on Ovid and Virgil, and for the sagas of the north, from Mallet's Northern Antiquities. He provides lively versions of the myths of Zeus and Hera, Venus and Adonis, Daphne and Apollo, and their cohorts on Mount Olympus; the love story of Pygmalion and Galatea; the legends of the Trojan War and the epic wanderings of Ulysses and Aeneas; the joys of Valhalla and the furies of Thor; and the tales of Beowulf and Robin Hood. The tales are eminently readable. As Bulfinch wrote, "Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated. . . . Our book is an attempt to solve this problem, by telling the stories of mythology in such a manner as to make them a source of amusement."Thomas Bulfinch, in his day job, was a clerk in the Merchant's Bank of Boston, an undemanding position that afforded him ample leisure time in which to pursue his other interests. In addition to serving as secretary of the Boston Society of Natural History, he thoroughly researched the myths and legends and copiously cross-referenced them with literature and art. As such, the myths are an indispensable guide to the cultural values of the nineteenth century; however, it is the vigor of the stories themselves that returns generation after generation to Bulfinch.

Romulus, My Father


Raimond Gaita - 1998
    Tragic events were to overtake the boy’s life, but Raimond Gaita has an extraordinary story to tell about growing up with his father amid the stony paddocks and flowing grasses of country Australia.Written simply and movingly, Romulus, My Father is about how a compassionate and honest man taught his son the meaning of living a decent life. It is about passion, betrayal and madness, about friendship and the joy and dignity of work, about character and fate, affliction and spirituality.

South of Darkness


John Marsden - 2014
    Life is a precarious business.When he hears of a paradise on the other side of the world – a place called Botany Bay – he decides to commit a crime and get himself transported to a new life, a better life.To succeed, he must survive the trials of Newgate Prison, the stinking hull of a prison ship and the unknown terrors of a journey across the world.And Botany Bay is far from the paradise Barnaby has imagined. When his past and present suddenly collide, he is soon fleeing for his life – once again.

A Moment in the Sun


John Sayles - 2011
    Gold has been discovered in the Yukon. New York is under the sway of Hearst and Pulitzer. And in a few months, an American battleship will explode in a Cuban harbor, plunging the U.S. into war. Spanning five years and half a dozen countries, this is the unforgettable story of that extraordinary moment: the turn of the twentieth century, as seen by one of the greatest storytellers of our time.Shot through with a lyrical intensity and stunning detail that recall Doctorow and Deadwood both, A Moment in the Sun takes the whole era in its sights—from the white-racist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina to the bloody dawn of U.S. interventionism in the Philippines. Beginning with Hod Brackenridge searching for his fortune in the North, and hurtling forward on the voices of a breathtaking range of men and women—Royal Scott, an African American infantryman whose life outside the military has been destroyed; Diosdado Concepcíon, a Filipino insurgent fighting against his country’s new colonizers; and more than a dozen others, Mark Twain and President McKinley’s assassin among them—this is a story as big as its subject: history rediscovered through the lives of the people who made it happen.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street


Anonymous - 1846
    This edition offers the original story with all its atmospheric Victorian trimmings. The story of Todd's murderous partnership with pie-maker Margery Lovett--at once inconceivably unpalatable and undeniably compelling--has subsequently set the table for a seemingly endless series of successful dramatic adaptations, popular songs and ballads, novellas, radio plays, graphic novels, ballets, films, and musicals. Both gleeful and ghoulish, the original tale of Sweeney Todd, first published under the title The String of Pearls, combines the story of Todd's grisly method of robbing and dispatching his victims--by way of Mrs. Lovett's meat pies--with a romantic sub-plot involving deception, disguise, and detective work, set against the backdrop of London's dark and unsavory streets. Editor Robert Mack 'fleshes' out the story with a fascinating introduction touching on the origins of the tale, the growth of the legend, and a history of its many retellings. Mack also includes explanatory notes that point out interesting aspects, plus a full chronology of the many versions of Sweeney Todd.Since Sweeney Todd first entered the public imagination in the mid-nineteenth-century, his exploits have chilled and fascinated audiences around the world. This new edition allows modern readers to savor the ghastly original in all its gruesome glory.

Australian Heist


James Phelps - 2018
    On June 15, 1862 a gang of bushrangers pulled off the largest gold robbery in Australia's history atEugowra Rocks. The gang escaped with bank notes and 77kg of gold, worth about $10 million today. It remains Australia's largest gold robbery. The story of how Ben Hall, Frank Gardiner, John O'Mealley, John Gilbert, Harry Manns, Alex Fordyce, John Bow and Dan Charters - planned and executed the robbery and what happened to all that gold is the stuff of a brilliant, modern, exciting crime book. This is Australian history on the very best crime-writing steroids from Australia's number one true crime writer.

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

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters


Julian Barnes - 1989
    Noah disembarks from his ark but he and his Voyage are not forgotten: they are revisited in on other centuries and other climes - by a Victorian spinster mourning her father, by an American astronaut on an obsessive personal mission. We journey to the Titanic, to the Amazon, to the raft of the Medusa, and to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin...This is no ordinary history, but something stranger, a challenge and a delight for the reader's imagination. Ambitious yet accessible, witty and playfully serious, this is the work of a brilliant novelist.

Girt


David Hunt - 2013
    No word could better capture the essence of Australia...In this hilarious history, David Hunt reveals the truth of Australia’s past, from megafauna to Macquarie – the cock-ups and curiosities, the forgotten eccentrics and Eureka moments that have made us who we are.Girt introduces forgotten heroes like Mary McLoghlin, transported for the crime of “felony of sock”, and Trim the cat, who beat a French monkey to become the first animal to circumnavigate Australia. It recounts the misfortunes of the escaped Irish convicts who set out to walk from Sydney to China, guided only by a hand-drawn paper compass, and explains the role of the coconut in Australia’s only military coup.Our nation’s beginnings are steeped in the strange, the ridiculous and the frankly bizarre. Girt proudly reclaims these stories for all of us.Not to read it would be un-Australian.