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 ...

Beat Zen and the art of Dave is the latest travel memoir by Australian author, David McNamara. His new book expands on the world of independent global travel, to capture how the wonderment of an outbound adventure conspires towards an equally profound inner journey. It is a personal account that ...

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...

The story of Taws, an Australian town about to celebrate its 20th anniversary. But one man is not about to celebrate. Returning from 15 years exile, he is intent on reminding the town of the brutal acts they perpetrated during their early years of settlement.

Lost to the world for more than four decades, A season on Earth is the essential link between two acknowledged masterpieces by Gerald Murnane: the lyrical account of boyhood in his debut novel, Tamarisk Row, and the revolutionary prose of The Plains. It is Murnane's second novel as it was intende...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

Lucie Tamberlani had it all: a business manager with a passion for naturopathy, she was set to take over the bookwork at the family strawberry farm in South Australia. But the unexpected fallout from a relationship sees her flee to Melbourne, raising her daughter alone. Summoned back to the farm ...

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.

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...

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...

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'...

Black sheep - there's one in every family. Orphaned at sixteen, James Wakefield was determined to be a gun shearer like his father. Now he's killed twice, changed his name, and is on the run from the law. He had his reasons for both murders, and he felt no joy in taking life. Or did he? Ben McKin...

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 conversion was Nick's idea. Nick -- so persuasive, ever the optimist, still boyishly handsome. Always on a quest to design the perfect environment, convinced it could heal a wounded soul. The conversion was Nick's idea, but it's Zoe who's here now, in a valley of old coalmines and new vineyar...

When someone is taken away, what is left behind? All her life, Till has lived in the shadow of the abduction of a childhood friend and her tormented wondering about whether she could have stopped it. When Till, now twenty-three, senses danger approaching again, she flees her past and the hovering...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

Trainee private investigator Lee Southern finds himself drawn into a web of danger and deceit as he investigates a series of bribery attempts targeting a wealthy entrepreneur. Under the expert tutelage of retiring PI Frank Swann, Lee uses all of his developing skills, instincts and cunning to get...

"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, ...

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 ...