Item category 2: Newmarket - Aussie authors

Internationally acclaimed as a novelist and memoirist, Robert Drewe returns to the short-story territory he has made his own. Set against a backdrop - the Australian coast - as randomly and imminently violent as it is beautiful, The Rip reveals the fragility of relationships between husbands and ...

Exiled to Canada due to his radical preaching on human right, Father Frank Docherty is now a psychologist and monk. On a visit to Australia he is unwittingly drawn into the stories of two people who claim to have been sexually abused by an eminent Sydney monsignor. As a man of character and consc...

In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one reads -- 'full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that glared glassily back.' Drylands is the story of the to...

Bird follows Carson, a youmg, cerebral Aboriginal man who traverses his way in and out of the prison system in Western Australia. The story is told through the multiple white characters Carson encounters along his journey. The novel is similar stylistically and thematically to Irvine Welsh's Trai...

Peter 'The Plum' Lum is a 48-year-old ex-star NRL player, living with his son and girlfriend in Cronulla. He's living a pretty cruisey life until one day he suffers an epileptic fit and discovers that he has a brain disorder as a result of the thousand-odd head knocks he took on the footy field i...

When a high-profile murder lands literally at her feet, Detective Emilia Hart sees a chance to expand her caseload beyond the endless succession of domestic violence she is forced to investigate. But this is no simple investigation. Another body, turns up, then another. Then more, a lot more. All...

Alice is only nine years old in 1910 when she is sent to the feared Coast Hospital Lazaret at Little Bay in Sydney, a veritable prison where more patients are admitted than will ever leave. She is told that she's visiting her mother, who disappeared one day when Alice was two years old. Once ther...

A group of school-leavers - free at last, ready to party, expectations high. And even though a remote island on the Western Australian coast wasn't exactly the plan, they're not going to let that hold them back. Leonardo, geeky, asthmatic, shy and prone to anxiety, has landed with them. He's terr...

Growing up, the Anderson sisters were close, even though they were different. Susie, the wild one, wanted an adventurous life while Mills followed a safer path. When Susie dies suddenly from a fall when hanging a string of lights for her fortieth birthday party, Mills is grief-stricken, even thou...

Song of the Sun God spans three continents and three generations of a family that remains dedicated to its homeland, whilst learning to embrace its new home. Funny, warm and tender, we see Nala and Rajan's family navigate war, migration, old loyalties and new beginnings, relying on the philosophy...

In September 1883, the South Australian town of Fairly huddles under strange, vivid sunsets and enormous dust storms. One of its own has gone missing - six-year-old Denny Wallace - and the whole town is intent on finding him.

Single mother Sarah is guilt-ridden when an accident leaves her young daughter, Melody, seriously injured and their once music-filled lives silent. When she discovers her grandmother Rosalie's war correspondence, she thinks she might have found a way to save her family, but it will require a leap...

Mari and Elisabeth have been at the centre of each other's lives for years. Close friends since university, they're now drifting through their mid-twenties, working casual jobs and living in run-down share houses. When they meet Jack, a charming academic historian twenty years their senior, they'...

Mary Bligh is no shrinking violet. After an horrific six-month sea voyage from Britain, she proves as strong-willed as her bloody-minded father, the newly appointed Governor William Bligh. The pair immediately scandalise Sydney with their personalities, his politics and her pantaloons. When three...

Since Archie Weller was runner-up for the first Vogel Award in 1980 for his novel The Day of the Dog, he has become an important voice in contemporary Indigenous writing. The Window Seat is a collection of his best fiction and a tribute to his contribution to Australian literature. These stories ...

When five couples pool their resources to live in a house located where a turquoise lagoon meets the sea and silver branches of mangroves glow in the moonlight, the quirky little offshore community of Cook's Basin is shocked. How will ten people--one in a wheelchair and one with a hauntingly fami...

There's serious litigation pending, the school is due for registration, and a powerful parent named Janet Bellevue has a lot to say about everything. As teachers they're trying to remain professional, as people they're unravelling fast. There's Tyson, first year out of uni and nervous as hell, De...

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...

Told from five different points of view, each one revealing something different, "On a bright hillside in Paradise," tells the story of a family of convict descendants in the back-blocks of Tasmania, on a farm in a place called Paradise. They lead hard-scrabble lives. The drama begins when strang...

Saskia Wyle spent one sultry European summer on Ile de Re when she was nineteen. The bright salt flats and sun-soaked beaches are now a distant memory, and one she made herself forget after an unspeakable tragedy. But the French heiress she befriended over twenty years ago has left half of her ma...

When Emily's beautiful cousin Aspen goes missing somewhere in the Outback, no one seems to take it seriously, not even the police. After all, Aspen has a history of drug use and a string of broken relationships to her name. Emily knows that her disappearance is totally out of character, even for ...

The body of a local teenage boy is found on the beach of a sleepy northern New South Wales town. David went for an evening swim and got into trouble. At least, that's what it looks like. Three weeks before, Leila, a young backpacker, didn't turn up for her shift at the local cafe. Benny, the owne...

"Jimmy Sharman is a conundrum. Raised in a large poor catholic family, becoming a tent boxer at age eleven. He blinds another boxer and is racked by guilt for the rest of his life yet develops an extremely profitable and popular showground fixture. We learn about Sharman's boxing tent spruiking, ...

A powerful, personal novel about women, children and justice, from one of this country's most-loved and clear-eyed storytellers.It's 1965 and Joe Cluny is living in a working-class suburb with his mum, Marion, and sister, Ruby, spending his days trying to avoid trouble with the nuns at the local ...

Three couples, friends since high school, rent a luxurious house in the mountains for an unplugged weekend of drinking and bushwalking. No internet, no phones, no stress. On the first night, the topic of partner-swapping comes up. It's a joke - at first. Not everyone is keen, but an agreement is ...

There's nothing quite so beautiful as Paris in the Spring; and when you add in the chance to learn the French way of food, in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, who can resist? Not Gabi Picabea or Kate Evans who have come from Australia to Sylvie Morel's Paris Cooking School. Both are at a crossr...

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 ...

Emergency In Maternity: Nursing supervisor Cate Forrest is shocked at her electric reaction to new CEO Noah Masters. He may be drop-dead gorgeous, but surely she can't be attracted to the man who's threatening the future of her beloved maternity ward. Cat's convinced he's bad news for the hospita...

When multi-millionaire Jacki Turner is forced to take stock of her life, she sets her daughters a challenge -- in order to inherit her vast fortune, each must fulfil a task that she believes will push them to become better versions of themselves. Rose, an exhausted mother of three, must write and...

A literary journey that delves into the intertwined lives of a town, its people, and a region shaped by revolution and war. The war broke out and she decided to call her dad. Weeks and weeks they do not speak, and the weeks become months and then they are so many years. As conflict plays out acro...