Madness, cruelty, and sexuality permeate the family's upper-crust Australian world. Lilian Una Singer starts life at the beginning of the 20th century as the daughter of a prosperous middle-class Australian family. She ends it as a cheerfully eccentric bag-lady living on the streets, quoting Shakespeare. This book traces the progress of her life's journey, and why she made the choices she did. She's a person large in spirit as well as body, who wants to invent her own story, rather than allow it to be invented for her. Life presents her with many obstacles, including the sinister advances of her father—but in spite of this she succeeds. Triumphantly she makes her life her own, savoring every moment with the reminder that "everything matters."

    Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. And although Jean talks to all her charges, she has a particular soft spot for a young dingo called Sue.As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu: its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals — first mammals, then birds and insects, too. As the flu progresses, the unstoppable voices become overwhelming, and many people begin to lose their minds, including Jean’s infected son, Lee. When he takes off with Kimberly, heading south, Jean feels the pull to follow her kin.Setting off on their trail, with Sue the dingo riding shotgun, they find themselves in a stark, strange world in which the animal apocalypse has only further isolated people from other species. Bold, exhilarating, and wholly original, The Animals in That Country asks what would happen if - for better or worse - we finally understood what animals were saying.

    A mysterious and elusive love affair haunts the lives of three women in Australia. Twenty years later, on the other side of the world, Charade Ryan sorts through story and counter-story for her father, the legendary Nicholas, and the truth about her origins.

    He lives with his gran and his uncle Rory. His best friend is Clinton Tull. Adrian loves to draw, and he wants a dog. He’s afraid of quicksand, shopping centers, and self-combustion. But as closely as he watches his suburban world, there is much he cannot understand. He does not, for instance, know why three neighborhood children might set out to buy ice cream one summer’s day and never be seen again. . . .In this suburb that is no longer safe and innocent, in a broken family of self-absorbed souls, Sonya Hartnett sets the story of a lone little boy - unwanted, unloved, and intensely curious - a story as achingly beautiful as it is shattering. As her quiet tale ominously unfolds, we are reminded of how fragile are the threads that hold us secure - and how brave, how precious, is the heart of each child who soldiers on.

    Thomas Keneally's evocative writing gives us searing insight into the sun-parched settlements of hungry transports and corruptive soldiers. But this is not an 'historical' novel in the usual sense. It is the story of a man, Corporal Phelim Halloran, and of the demands made on him - by his girl, his Irish comrades, his superior officers, and, most often, by his conscience. Innocent and lover, poet, soldier-by-accident, scholar by the standards of his day, Halloran attempts to make a world unto himself. through his pity and love for Ann Rush, his 'secret bride'; but many seem pledged to complicate these simple desires. There is the convict-artist, Thomas Ewers, persecuted and compelled to illustrate the officers' journals. There is Halloran's feckless colleague, Terry Byrne. The convict, Quinn, whose term of imprisonment should have been nearly over. Robert Hearne, political prisoner, government clerk and traitor. Halloran comes to disbelieve in any other existence except his own and God's, until, shockingly and irrevocably, he is reunited with Ann."

    Their view of themselves is not shared by people looking from outside in--visitors, and particularly relatives--for they have to see something pretty humdrum, even if, as in this case, the fecklessness they complain of is extreme.

    In writing that is inventive, bold, and generous, Axiomatic introduces an unforgettable voice.

    Meat Man is a regular, a very regular regular, who views the world - the world of the pub and its clientele - through his beer glass, his glass canoe which transports them all to other worlds, worlds of fighting and loving and, above all, drinking. The grand saga of the Southern Cross or the tragic futility of humanity at a watering hole? Perhaps it's all to be taken on a bent elbow with another swallow."

    Mr Sakamoto, a survivor of the atomic bomb, is an expert on Alexander Graham Bell. The pair forge an unlikely friendship as Mr Sakamoto regales Alice with stories of twentieth-century invention. His own knowledge begins to inform her writing, and these two solitary beings become a mutual support for each other a long way from home.This novel from Man Booker longlisted author Gail Jones is distinguished by its honesty and intelligence. From the boundlessness of space walking to the frustrating constrictions of one person's daily existence, Dreams of Speaking paints with grace and skill the experience of needing to belong despite wanting to be alone.

    Obsessed with their own habitat and history, they hire artisans, writers and historians to record in minute detail every aspect of their lives, and the nature of their land. A young film-maker arrives on the plains, hoping to make his own contribution to the elaboration of this history. In a private library he begins to take notes for a film, and chooses the daughter of his patron for a leading role.Twenty years later, he begins to tell his haunting story of life on the plains. As his story unfolds, the novel becomes, in the words of Murray Bail, 'a mirage of landscape, memory, love and literature itself'.

    Its poetic yet visceral style announced the arrival afresh and exciting new talent. This 10th anniversary edition celebrates its important contribution to Australian literature.When May's mother dies suddenly, she and her brother Billy are taken in by Aunty. However, their loss leaves them both searching for their place in a world that doesn't seem to want them. While Billy takes his own destructive path, May sets off to find her father and her Aboriginal identity.Her journey leads her from the Australian east coast to the far north, but it is the people she meets, not the destinations, that teach her what it is to belong.

    Her life has taken her from a failed marriage in Sydney to freedom in London; she forged a modest career as a seamstress and lived with two dear friends through the happiest years of her adult life.At home, the neighborhood children she remembers have grown into compassionate adults. They help to nurse her back from pneumonia, and slowly let her in on the dark secrets of the neighborhood in the years that have lapsed.With grace and humor, Nora recounts her desire to escape, the way her marriage went wrong, the vanity that drove her to get a facelift, and one romantic sea voyage that has kept her afloat during her dark years. Her memory is imperfect, but the strength and resilience she shows over the years is nothing short of extraordinary. A book about the sweetness of escape, and the mix of pain and acceptance that comes with returning home.

    Lucky's is a story of family.It is also about a man called Lucky.His restaurant chain.A fire that changed everything.A New Yorker article which might save a career.The mystery of a missing father.An impostor who got the girl.An unthinkable tragedy.A roll of the dice.And a story of love, lost, sought and won again, (at last).

    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.

    Celebrated as a novelist in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Philip Roth, Elliot Perlman writes of impulse and paralysis, empty marriages, lovers, gambling, and the stock market; of adult children and their parents; of poetry and prostitution, psychiatry and the law. Comic, poetic, and full of satiric insight, Seven Types of Ambiguity is, above all, a deeply romantic novel that speaks with unforgettable force about the redemptive power of love.The story is told in seven parts, by six different narrators, whose lives are entangled in unexpected ways. Following years of unrequited love, an out-of-work schoolteacher decides to take matters into his own hands, triggering a chain of events that neither he nor his psychiatrist could have anticipated. Brimming with emotional, intellectual, and moral dilemmas, this novel-reminiscent of the richest fiction of the nineteenth century in its labyrinthine complexity-unfolds at a rapid-fire pace to reveal the full extent to which these people have been affected by one another and by the insecure and uncertain times in which they live. Our times, now.