Item category 2: Newmarket - Aussie authors

In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they...

Max didn't believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he remains, he watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the flat they shared and begins to realise how much of her life was invisible to him. In the weeks and months before Max's death, Hanna...

When Mulanyin meets the beautiful Nita in Edenglassie, their saltwater people still outnumber the British. As colonial unrest peaks, Mulanyin dreams of taking his bride home to Yugambeh Country, but his plans for independence collide with white justice. Two centuries later, fiery activist Winona ...

Marnie is sixty-three and downwardly mobile. Her middle-class marriage is long gone, her only child more or less estranged. She's living in a granny flat behind a stranger's house. Still, things could be worse. She likes her new boss, Trinh, and her flat has a leadlight window depicting a galleon...

When a rare and highly endangered bird flies into Lucy’s bedroom window, she feels it’s a sign. Of what, she’s not exactly sure, but maybe it means she’ll get her life back on track after the sudden death of her brother a year ago. Maybe she’ll find some meaning in the randomness of existence and...

A debut novel from one of Australia's most internationally celebrated playwrights, The End and Everything Before It is a kaleidoscopic story about the way love and loss shape a community. Emma watched her mother's kayak disappear among icebergs in the Arctic Sea. Six years later, her brother, who...

When Yael Silver's world comes crashing down, she looks to the past for answers and finds solace in surprising places. An unconventional new friendship, a seaside safe space and an unsettling amount of dairy help her to heal, as she wrestles with her demons and some truly terrible erotic literatu...

Botanical artist Jane Saville is devastated when her manipulative mother banishes her to the countryside to protect someone else's honour. Isolated far from home, she is forced to live an impoverished, secretive life to save the family from public shame. Guy Attwood is heir to a fortune, but pref...

The Soviet Union 1938: Lavrentiy Beria, 'The Boss' of the Georgian republic, nervously prepares a Black Sea resort for a visit from 'The Boss of Bosses', his fellow Georgian Josef Stalin. Under escalating pressure from enemies and allies alike, never certain who he can trust, Beria slowly but sur...

Stephen Bolin leaves a bizarre note by his deathbed, asking his sisters to take his body back to his birthplace in Far North Queensland. When they ignore his request, Stephen's corpse makes the nocturnal pilgrimage alone. But what is compelling him and what will he find there? His journey, as a k...

At seventeen, Maeve is naively single-minded about pursuing a life in the theatre. After a rigorous audition process, she secures a position at one of the most competitive drama schools in the country. Leaving behind the security of her childhood home in Queensland, Maeve moves to Melbourne and d...

Kate arrives on the wild, remote island of Rathlin in the freezing Irish Channel for a ten-day writers' retreat. Plagued by memories she can't unravel and desperate to understand the breakdown of her marriage, Kate is determined to leave the retreat with answers. As the retreat's director uses te...

After thirteen years it's time for Mac to return home to face a past he's been running from. A past his best friend Dave has been unable to escape. It was 1990, their final year of school and with an INXS soundtrack, life was moving on. Bus stops, homework and football were giving way to pay slip...

From horse thief to the merchant queen of Sydney Cove, how did one woman rise so far? Born into poverty in eighteenth-century England, her future was predetermined. But throughout her life Molly Thistle refused to follow the path laid out before her. Her headstrong nature, disdain for convention ...

Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa is on a quest to describe how she became an all-round performer after a childhood in a quiet and undramatic migrant family. Where did it all go wrong? Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa knows a thing or two about telling a story. From her experience on stages and in front of live and televis...

The story of a woman who changes the world that wants to change her. Geraldine is born with an adventurer's heart. Whether it is sneaking out of home in Yorkshire, escaping from boarding school in Rhodesia, or buying hormones from the local speed dealer in Weston-super-Mare, Geraldine is wide ope...

Finn and her best friend Daphne have grown up together in the Blue Mountains, NSW. Bonded by both having lost a younger sister to suicide, they've always had a close -- sometimes too close -- friendship. Now in their twenties, their lives have finally started to diverge: Daphne is at university a...

It's 1989 and for a young Jewish-Australian violinist, a scholarship to Berlin is the chance of a lifetime. Germany is on the verge of change as the wall is torn down, and Susanna is swept along by the tumultuous event. Under the careful guidance of Stefan Heinemeyer, her renowned violin teacher ...

Melbourne, 1945. Born into a well-to-do family, Maggie Johnson wants freedom from her parents' strict conservative beliefs and their unbending desire for her to marry the right sort of man. Instead, Maggie longs to forge her own path in life. Lil Kelly, who lives in the slums, works tirelessly to...

From the acclaimed author of Cooper Not Out comes a novel set in the Melbourne Goldrush era that reimagines the running of the inaugural Melbourne Cup. Some stories are too good to be true … It's the 1861 and there are three campfires burning outside the gold-mining town of Mull Creek. At the fir...

It's the height of summer in Australia, 1979, and on a quiet suburban cul-de-sac in Canberra a housewife is scrubbing the yellow and white chequered tiles of the bathroom floor. But all is not as it seems. For one thing, it's 3 am. For another, she is trying desperately to remove all traces of bl...

Satanists in Perth. Panthers in Sydney. Inner Melbourne's secret morgue. Australia is stuffed full of stories that need to be taken with a big spoon of salt. Stories that we all know are silly, but that we also just can't help sharing. In Great Australian Urban Legends, Eamon Evans presents you w...

Riverina 1974: When nineteen-year-old farmgirl Adelaide Hoffman applies for a cadetship at the Gunnawah Gazette, she sees it as her ticket out of a life too small for her. Its owner, Valdene Bullark, sees something of the girl she once was in young Adelaide. Val puts Adelaide straight to work. Wh...

Khadija is packing up her home of fifty years. In her box of special belongings are the last reminders she has of her son Ahmed, missing for more than twenty years. Her belongings take her back to her village childhood, her marriage and move to Marrakesh, and the birth of Ahmed when she was just ...

Welcome to Green River. Five families on an annual camping trip, a mothers group of fourteen years, children starting to look like adults, a father with his own mysterious agenda... He Would Never is about the bonds we forge in the furnace of early motherhood, the trust we place in other adults, ...

Margot and her sister Roslyn have lived side by side in a little town in the Adelaide Hills most of their lives, supporting each other through thick and thin. Then their neighbour Gunter dies. Surprisingly, his will asks that his house and vineyard be sold and that Roslyn donate the money to a ch...

'I saw my mother for a long time after she died. I would see her out windows, or in the corner of my eye. Always in the periphery, always a dim blur, but unmistakably my mother, the herness skating through every line and flicker'. Charlotte (Lot) and Ellen (Nelly) are sisters who were once so clo...

Aside from a delay, there will be no problems. The flight will be smooth, it will land safely. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off. But almost all of them will be forever changed. Because on this ordinary domestic flight, something extraordinary happens. People learn how and when they are...

You only take the High Wire if you're desperate -- or up to no good. A notorious unmarked track through outback Australia, the "Wire" crosses slabs of lawless land, body-dumping grounds and mobile phone blackspots. Harvey Buck is certainly desperate. Racing to be with his dying girlfriend, he enc...

In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged with a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims' families, but its impact travels even further, into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into...