Item category 2: Newmarket - Aussie authors

Himalayas: Unknown Year. 'Ten thousand strands of trouble,' is what Bird's father says, watching as Bird's sister braids her hair. On the eve of her fourteenth year, that trouble finds Bird. Fleeing her home to escape an arranged marriage, she attempts to vanish into a crowd of pilgrims not knowi...

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...

A woman returns to Australia to clear out her father's house, with an eye to transforming the contents into an art installation in the tradition of the revered Chinese artist, Song Dong. What she hasn't reckoned with is the tangle of jealousies, resentments, and familial complications that she ha...

Leah has a good life. She lives on the Drove, an inner-city cul-de-sac, with her husband, Moses, and their two children. She and her neighbours - the Drovers - look out for each other. Theirs is a safe, community-oriented enclave and that's the way it's going to stay. When itinerants set up camp ...

The thing about friendships formed in childhood ... is that they're like an invisible tattoo. They mark you and mould you. They're under your skin. When a last collection of songs by British musical icon, James Bennett, is discovered in an old Somerset house, rumours about his mysterious death du...

A grandson tries to learn the family story. But what kind of story is it? Is it a prison memoir, about the grandfather imprisoned without charge or trial by a revolutionary government? Is it an oral history of the grandmother left behind to look after the children? Or is it a love story? A detect...

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 ...

**Shortlisted, Miles Franklin Literary Award 2024** When a troubled Sarah Hutchinson returns to Australia from boarding school in England and time spent in Europe, she is sent to live with her eccentric Uncle Ferny on the family property, Ngangahook. With the sound of the ocean surrounding every...

It's 1986, and 'beautiful, radical ideas' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students-and Kit. He claims to be in a 'deconstructed' relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her wor...

Grace is a thief: a good one. She was taught by experts and she’s been practising since she was a kid. She specialises in small, high-value items—stamps, watches—and she knows her Jaeger-LeCoultres from her Patek Philippes. But it’s a solitary life, always watchful, always moving. It’s not the li...

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...

Adrift in outer space, a motley crew of human-made objects tell their tales, making real history sweeter and stranger. Starman, a lovelorn mannequin orbiting the Sun in his cherry-red car, pines for his creator. The first sculpture ever taken to the Moon is possessed by the spirit of Neil Armstro...

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 ...

Things have not been going well for Zoe Ann Weiss. Once a young novelist full of promise, now she has a failed debut under her belt, a mountain of debt, a dead-end job, and an agent who's about to drop her if she doesn't write something new and brilliant soon. Worst of all, she's blocked. Can't-w...

When Billie wakes up in a strange guy's bed, her first thought is: what happened last night? She can't even remember meeting him. And how the hell did she get to Coney Island? Then reality bites and the memories flood in -- the reason she was in that bar, drinking to start with: today she's going...

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...

'Islanders must do everything together. We painted ngatu together. We crossed the ocean together. We settled on isles together. We took up Christianity together. We entered into new citizenships together. We became wage workers together. We lived with generations upon generations stacked in fibro...

For Ava, heading to university in Sydney is her escape from a poverty-stricken upbringing. Her mother is long gone, her father able to provide love but little else. On the other side of the world, Laurie tolerates university only at the insistence of her father, a Marxist professor. Her mother di...

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...

"Set in Melbourne in the late 1950s, and taking place over the course of two days and nights, Alone chronicles a young woman's hopelessness and obsession provoked by the ending of a passionate relationship. A fledgling writer, estranged from her family and a dropout from university, she recalls h...

As a terrible pandemic rages through the small medieval hamlet of Villingraz, a young girl, Estie, accompanied by her goat Isabel, sets off into the forest, in search of a cure for her sister who is infected with the pox. Her father Merdocai has surrendered himself to the evil Marquis to be exper...

In a world of monsters, falling in love requires sacrifice. River. As VP of Devils MC, every decision I make is to protect the Club. I'm the one they call when things go south. That means getting my hands dirty - a lot. Outsiders think I'm a monster. I agreed. Until Bella. She was able to look p...

When talented young artist Jack Tomlinson travels from Australia to London for six months to visit relatives, he unexpectedly finds himself transported into the bohemian art world of Paris as an art student, finding love and friendship. He learns that while life may give you everything you ever d...

It is not wise to anger the gods ... or to fall in love with one. Psykhe has always been different. Fair as Venus, the goddess of love, and with the hard-won ability to save the lives of those of mortal blood, she is both shunned and revered. When she unwittingly provokes Venus, she and her siste...

Was she taken... or did she run? Former London police officer Rose Campbell has been estranged from her daughter, Lou, for almost a decade. But when Lou disappears from a remote Western Australian beach, and the police suspect her of kidnapping the two young children in her care, Rose is asked to...

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 the serene setting of Vanuatu's Santo Island, tranquillity shatters when the lifeless body of a French farmer, Guy Simeon, is discovered on the pristine white sands of Champagne Beach. As they delve deeper, a labyrinth of secrets, coercion, and lies emerges. Simeon's missing wife and strained ...

1898: Bendigo, Victoria. Evie Emerson has worked hard to build a fashionable clientele for her hats. But when an ex-paramour employs underhanded tactics after his attempt to coerce an engagement fails, Evie's reputation is in tatters. On the heels of having to put a case together to defend hersel...

Melbourne, 1927. The summer flowers smell like Christmas the night Zara Dickins meets Harry Holt. Zara is wearing a dress she has designed and made herself: white organdie over a short black slip, with black embroidery and a crimson taffeta sash. It's party season and the university crowd are cel...

Claverton Castle, 1940. Eagles and Spitfires fly in the skies of England as Lady Deanna, the aristocratic granddaughter of the Duke of Claverton, spends her days shovelling manure and her evenings in blue satin, attending dinner parties to gather intelligence from the many Nazi sympathisers among...