Longlisted for the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award Zoe Howard is seventeen when her brother, Russell, introduces her to Stephen Quayle. Aloofand harsh, Stephen is unlike anyone she has ever met, 'a weird, irascible character out of somedense Russian...

The last person Zac expects in the room next door is a girl like Mia, angry and feisty with questionable taste in music. In the real world, he wouldn't-couldn't-be friends with her.The last person Zac expects in the room next door is a girl like Mia,...

Introduced by Emily Perkins Here in one volume are twenty-three of the finest stories by Katherine Mansfield. Considered one of the finest short-story writers of the twentieth century, Mansfield was from a young age heavily influenced by Anton...

Introduced by Tim Flannery At length, almost to our sorrow, we made the land upon the 3rd of June 1790, just one year all but one day from our leaving the river. We landed all our convicts safe. First published in 1822, this is the extraordinary...

In Housewife Superstar, Danielle Wood introduced us to the life (three husbands, Campbell Townand Devonport dream homes, inspiration for Dame Edna Everage) and work (countless writings,prizes, cakes, and things knitted, crocheted, sewed) of Mrs Marjorie...

A young boy plays the violin for his mother in Melbourne. Nina Simone sings 'Pirate Jenny' in a bar in Berlin. A fisherman plays a flute on the Mekong. And the strains of Paganini resonate in the forests of eastern Poland. From the cabarets of 1940s...

Introduced byRamona Koval He straightened his spine, raised his head, and extended his gun arm towards me in a slow, vertical arc. I saw then what he was, and stood still in front of him, for he was here on business. He was a small, serious,...

Winner of the prestigious 2001 Viareggio-Repaci Prize for Fiction.1978, the hottest summer of the twentieth century. In a tiny Italian rural community, the adults shelter indoors while six children venture out on their bikes across the scorched, deserted...

Set in Ballarat and Melbourne during the gold rush era, Madame Midas is a gripping tale of greed, romance and intrigue'She had turned everything she touched into gold, and though it brought her no happiness, yet it was the cause of happiness to others...

Introduced by Fiona Wood, this is the delightful second novel in the Melling Sisters Trilogy, following All in the Blue Unclouded Weather.The Melling sisters and their mother are preparing for a wedding. Cathy is to be bridesmaid and her dress is a thing...

The iconic, much-loved winner of the 1990 CBCA Book of the Year Award for Older Readers, now republished as a Text Classic with an introduction by Simmone Howell.Seymour is bored and lonely, and running from a gang of kids when he opens a back-lane gate...

A stunning memoir about the fraught relationship between a mother and daughter that will speak to generations of womenA memoir of mothers and daughters, traced through four generations, from Paris to New York and back again. More than Nadja Spiegelman's...

Text is celebrating the publication of its 100th Classic with a well-priced set of 100 collectible postcards featuring W.H. Chong's iconic and original book coversText is celebrating the publication of its 100th Classic with a well-priced set of 100...

Eliza travels to Sydney to deal with the estate of her Aunt Dodge, and finds Maxine, a hitherto unknown cousin, occupying Dodge's apartment. When legal complications derail plans to live it up on their inheritance, the women's lives become consumed by...

Detective Sergeant Harry Belltree, back on the job after a near-fatal confrontation with corrupt colleagues, has become a departmental embarrassment. The solution is a posting away from Sydney and a quiet life in Newcastle.Shortlisted for the 2016 Ned...

In the tradition of Neil Gaiman's Coraline and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland comes a wonderfully imaginative, spooky and intricate novel for 10-13 year olds.Timid Elizabeth and her unusual and fearless friend Zenobia arrive at...

'All the rapture and calamity of youth. Jennifer Down is a writer of rare insight and heart.' - Carrie Tiffany Audrey, Katy and Adam have been friends since high school-a decade of sneaky cigarettes, drunken misadventures on Melbourne backstreets,...

In the 150 years since the end of the Civil War and the ratificiation of the Thirteenth Amendment, the story of race and America has remained a brutally simple one, written on flesh- it is the story of the black body, exploited to create the country's...

A group of Jewish refugees are thrown together on board a dilapidated freighter charting a course for Australia. Fleeing terrible scenes of destruction in Europe, they are bound by a deep sense of loss and the uncertainty of their fate. As the ship...

From the award-winning author of The A-Z of Convicts in Van Diemen's Land comes an utterly original work of Australian history, examining and illustrating the tattoos of convict men and women.At least thirty-seven per cent of male convicts and fifteen...

Kinglake-350 to VKC. Urgent, do you read me? The fire's here now. God help us.Kinglake-350 is a masterpiece of writing about family, community, country life and what happens when a day of ultimate terror arrives. Adrian Hyland takes a dramatic and...

Isobel Callaghan is struggling to make a career as a writer in Sydney. She is isolated, poor and hungry, and fears she's going mad. Leaving her room in a boarding house in search of food, she has a breakdown on the way to the corner shop. Waking in...

Travels with Epicurus- A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of an Authentic Old Age is a humorous, uplifting meditation on finding the pleasures of old age, by the New York Times bestselling co-author of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar.When...

A wonderful collection of twenty-four short stories that celebrate the history, culture and creativity of Tasmania. Tasmania is another country-a lush, sometimes foreboding island with a people fiercely protective of its history, culture and creativity...

Ever thought, 'There should be a German word for that'? Well, now there is. From the mind that created Schott's Original Miscellany comes a unique volume exploring theidiosyncrasies of the human condition...auf Deutsch. In which language but German...

Lillipilly Hill is the story of Harriet Wilmot and her family, who have come to live in an inherited house in the New South Wales town of Barley Creek at the end of the nineteenth century. Harriet is in awe of Australia, despite the heat and...

Our minds are like those maps at the entrance to the Metro stations in Paris. They are full ofunilluminated directions. But when we know where we want to go and press the right button, theroute is illuminated before us in electric clarity. Diana von...

What happens when an unadventurous adventure writer tries to re-create the original expedition to Machu Picchu? In 1911, Hiram Bingham III climbed into the Andes Mountains of Peru and 'discovered' Machu Picchu. While history has recast Bingham as a...

Introduced byShane Maloney Down on his luck and hard up for cash, Carl works in the kitchen of a seedy rock 'n' roll joint in ethnically diverse Brunswick. The bouncers and bosses terrify him, he's desperately in love with a much younger Greek...

In this provocative book, New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Daniel H.Pink offers a fresh look at the art and science of persuasion. Physicians sell patients on a remedy. Lawyers sell juries on a verdict. Teachers sell students...

Introduced by Carmen Callil Henry Handel Richardson's debut, published in London in 1908, is set in the music scene of turn-of-the-century Leipzig, a cosmopolitan centre for the arts drawing students from around the world-among them Maurice Guest, a...

Introduced by Michael McGirr 'The year I remember best from those days is 1929. This was the year I turned fourteen and went into the eighth grade; the year too that Grandfather McDonald became peculiar and we moved to live with him in his house on...

Seventeen-year-old Friday Brown is on the run-running to escape memories of her mother andof the family curse. And of a grandfather who'd like her to stay. She's lost, alone and afraid. Silence, a street kid, finds Friday and she joins him in a gang led...

Hal Challis is in trouble at home and abroad- carpeted by the boss for speaking out about policebudget cuts; missing his lover, Ellen Destry, who is overseas on a study tour. But there's plenty to keep his mind off his problems. A rapist in a police...

Introduced byTim Flannery The vast interior of this new continent was wrapped in total obscurity; and excited, perhaps on that very account, full as much curiosity as did the forms of the shores.In this edited selection of his journals, Matthew...

Introduced by John Clarke Do you sign on the dotted lion? Is your tea nature Orpheus rocker? Who is Charlie Charm Puck in 'Waltzing Matilda'?There was never any book about Australian speech like Strine or about posh British speech like Fraffly Well...

Introduced by Tim Flannery do not hesitate to declare that the natives of New South Wales possess a considerable portion of that acumen, or sharpness of intellect, which bespeaks genius.In 1788 Watkin Tench stepped ashore at Sydney Cove with the...

A wonderful novel by one of Australia's most loved and awarded writers, long out of print and now revived by the Text Classics series.Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, 1967At the world's end, it is Sunday afternoon in February. Through the...

Introduced byJacinta Tynan Who the hell's Nino Culotta. That's what you asked yourself when you first picked up this book, wasn't it? Well I'm Nino Culotta. My father baptised me Giovanni-John-well Giovannino is like Johnny, and Nino is an easier way of...

Two years ago Eva Khatchadourian's son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker and a popular teacher. Now, in a series of letters to her absent husband, Eva recounts the story of how Kevin came to be Kevin. Fearing...

Wyatt's been away. Now he's back.That's as much as anyone really knows about him. The rest is rumour, the kind that makes people wary. And that's fine with Wyatt.Eddie Oberin thinks he knows enough about Wyatt to make him an offer. A jewel heist- inside...

We stand at a crossroads, where comprehension of our place in nature-of our true abilities and of our history-is supremely important. We have formed a global civilisation of unprecedented might, driven forward by the power of our minds-a civilisation...

Four mysterious letters change Miranda's world. Miranda and Sal are best friends, but when Sal gets punched by a new kid for no apparent reason, he shuts Miranda out of his life. Then she finds a mysterious note scrawled on a tiny slip of paper- I am...

Kate Grenville's novel The Secret River moved and exhilarated many people when it was first published in 2005. Readers marvelled at the subtlety of its language, and the power of Grenville's story-telling. And they recognised that this simple tale of a...

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a...

In this volume Tim Flannery brings together two classic Australian tales of travel and exploration.Watkin Tench, a young marine captain with the First Fleet, landed in Botany Bay in 1788. With his natural curiosity and genius for storytelling he...

Romulus Gaita fled his home in his native Yugoslavia at the age of thirteen, and came to Australia with his young wife Christine and their four-year-old son soon after the end of World War II. Tragic events were to overtake them. Raimond Gaita has an...

A classic of war reportage, first published in 1944, Tobruk 1941 is 'riveting...brings to vivid life the battle.' (Age)In early 1941 Australian soldiers stormed Italy's stronghold on the Libyan coast and took control of the port city of Tobruk. Heavily...