'I'm not deaf, but I've always felt more at home in Sign. Both my parents are deaf. Deaf as posts.Deaf as adders, deaf as beetles. And proud as peacocks, Deaf Pride long before there was aword, or a sign, for it. I learnt to speak with my hands from...

Bec Reich is recovering from surgery when Emily phones, so naturally Bec thinks she is hallucinating. Emily, famous worldwide for her paintings and also for her madness, lives in Beijing - but that's not why they haven't spoken for so long.I search for...

Introduced by Krissy Kneen First published in 1995,Eat Mebecame an instant international bestseller-and caused a scandal in the US. Julia is a photographer, Chantal edits a fashion magazine, Helen is a feminist academic and Philippa is a writer...

Lenin's Kisses is a brilliant novel about modern China. Blind, deaf, and disfigured, the 197citizens of the Village of Liven enjoy a peaceful lifestyle, spared from the government's watchfuleye. But when an unseasonal snowstorm wipes out the grain crops,...

At the turn of the twenty-first century acclaimed novelist Rana Dasgupta arrived in the Indian capital with a single suitcase. He had no intention of staying for long. But the city beguiled him-he 'fell in love and in hate with it'-and, fourteen years...

A gothic tale for readers of all ages from the author of the bestselling The Shadow of the Wind. Barcelona, 1980. scar Drai finds himself drawn to an old dilapidated mansion where he meets the captivating and elusive Marina. She leads him to the...

From the beginning Jack and I was friends. Somehow our way of looking at things fittedtogether. He never called me Dolly, the way the others did, only my full and proper name. Sarah Thornhill is the youngest child of William Thornhill,...

'Answer the question, Ruby.' 'There was no question.' 'Are you or are you not planning to use a trip to the United States to skip your birthday?' 'I will becrossing the international dateline at the time, rendering me twenty-nine forever more.' In...

A new collection of short stories from the Swedish master of the macabre, featuring a briefsequel to Let the Right One In. Customs officer Tina can smell a smuggler's guilt. Josef has a close encounter with Death-and discovers you can negotiate. Joel's...

Feted and fetishised, the breast is an evolutionary masterpiece. But in the modern world, the breast is changing. Breasts are getting bigger, developing earlier and attracting newfangled chemicals. Increasingly, the odds are stacked against us in the...

Introduced by Kate De Goldi There was an old man who lived on the edge of the world and he had a horse called Sydney Bridge Upside Down. He was a scar-faced old man and his horse was a slow-moving bag of bones, and I start with this man and his horse...

Introduced byPeter Goldsworthy Winner, Nobel Prize for Literature 2003She pouts. I was expecting more of a story, she says. It is difficult to get into the swing when the subject keeps changing.An ageing writer fills his journal- he has opinions about...

Introduced by Lindsay Tanner My heart pumped hard and fast, fed by the jitter of adrenaline coursing through my veins. This was getting beyond a joke...Don't you just hate it when somebody tries to kill you and you don't know who or why?There's a...

Introduced by Robyn Nevin Winner, Miles Franklin Literary Award 1963'Oh, aren't you lucky, PS.' 'Goodness, what a lucky boy.' 'What a treat!' 'Your Aunt Vanessa is coming.' Vanessa was coming all the way from England back to Australia and she was...

Introduced byLouise Adler Shortlisted, Miles Franklin Literary Award 1995 Winner, Victorian Premier's Literary Award 1995This is Albion Gidley Singer at the pen, a man with a weakness for a good fact. The first fact is always the hardest- you have to...

Twelve-year-old Florine Gilham lives in a fishing village on the coast of Maine with her parents in what would appear to be an idyllic situation - on the waters in a harbour, where she and her friends run wild in the nearby pine woods and along the rocky...

Plastic built the modern world. Where would we be without bike helmets, toothbrushes, babies bottles and pacemakers? But a century into our love affair with plastic, we're starting to realise it's not such a healthy relationship. Plastics draw on...

In her new falling-down home, in her new street, in her new suburb, Jelly waits for high school to begin. She can only feel happy up in the branches of the old apricot tree and by the creek at the back of the house. One night, Jelly and her cousins spot...

The year is 1951 and Holland Winchester, the local thug and a war veteran, has gone missing from his small, backwater South Carolina town. The local sheriff, Will Alexander, has a gut feeling Holland's been murdered but the sheriff can find neither the...

Bestselling novelist Joe Logan walks out into a hot summer's evening in central London. The next day his body is found dumped in a disused Victorian crypt at the Brompton Cemetery.Detective Inspector Mark Tartaglia is convinced that Logan's personal life...

The Christmas Story. Beautiful, simple, inspirational...and not just for Christians. Actually, it's not all that simple either. It turns out there are a few burning Christmass-y questions to tackle- . Who told the Christmas Story in the first place? ...

September 11 2001 marked a change inAustralian attitudes towards immigrants. The spotlight was on Muslims. This collection of thought-provoking essays looks at multiculturalism's successes and failures in providing a secure, well-integrated, free and...

A guy who howls. A girl on a mission to forget. In the suburb of Shyness, where the sun doesn't rise and the border crackles with a strange energy, Wolfboy meets a stranger at the Diabetic Hotel. She tells him her name is Wildgirl, and she dares him to...

When his fiancee breaks off their engagement, Patrick Oxtoby leaves home and moves to a boarding house in a seaside town. But in spite of his hopes and determination to build a better life, nothing goes to plan and Patrick is soon driven to take a...

Would you go to the gates of Hell for your job? American Federal Agent Jay 'Bird' Dobyns did. For nearly two years, Dobyn's infiltrated the world's most notorious biker gang-the Hells Angels. An undercover agent for the US government, Bird left his...

Emily Tempest has been away from Central Australia for a long time - uni, travel, deadend jobs. Finding trouble all over the world. Now she's back at Moonlight Downs, the community where she grew up, half in the Aboriginal world, half in the white. And...

The only thing a worthy criminal takes from the cops is a beating, and even that he gives back, when the right moment comes.Siberian Education is the story of a tiny, tightly knit community of 'honest' and 'dishonest' criminals in Transnistria, a remote...

Emily Tempest is small, black, as snaky as a taipan's tooth and is the woman least likely ever to embark on a career in policing. But her old mate Superintendent Tom MacGillivray has persuaded her to sign on as the Aboriginal Community Police Officer for...

We all know parenthood brings massive changes. But not every couple is prepared for the impact pregnancy and childbirth can have on their intimate relationship. Sure, we expect to put sex on hold for a while just before and after the birth, but most of...

The lights are refusing to go out all over Stockholm. There's a mysterious problem in the power system. Every appliance in the city is going at full blast and the entire population is struck by blinding headaches. The pressure builds to an intolerable...

The First World War was only meant to last six months. When the Australians and New Zealanders arrived at the Western Front in 1916, the fighting had been going for a year and a half and there was no end in sight. The men took their place in a line of...

In 1901 the Australian colonies came together to form a new nation which, for the next twenty-six years, was governed from Melbourne. It was a small city, a place where people knew each other-not just the people who mattered, but those who didn't...

Provocative, wide-ranging and full of wisdom, Between the Monster and the Saint is a brilliant book about our place in the world. Being human isn't easy. We might think that consciousness and free will give us control over our lives but our minds are...

Hari's father has been captured and enslaved to work in Deep Salt. Hari vows to rescue him, a forbidding task- Deep Salt is the most feared of Company's mines. No one knows what's being mined there-no one ever returns to tell. But Hari was born and...

It was John Wedge, Batman's private surveyor, who named the Yarra Yarra. In September 1835 he was at the Turning Basin with some Kulin and heard them identify the river as it came over the Falls as, he wrote, 'Yarrow Yarrow'. It was only some months...

Do you know what a Vic-wit is? Have you ever had a nibble pie? Now in it's third edition, The Dinkum Dictionary, is even better than ever. This fascinating book describes the origins and usage of words ranging from 'mulga' to 'anzac', from 'furphy' to...

In 1860, an eccentric Irish police officer named Robert O'Hara Burke led a cavalcade of camels, wagons and men out of Melbourne. Accompanied by William Wills, a shy English scientist, he was prepared to risk everything to become the first European to...

In Vientiane's Mahosot Hospital morgue, 73-year-old Dr Siri Paiboun, national coroner of Laos, handles the fatalities at the state hospitals-and the odd murder. His assistants - the gorgeous, clever, fat Nurse Dtui and the slow but irreplaceable Geung -...

Is falling in love with a stranger what it means to be a foreigner?At eighteen, Anna is in limbo. She has decisions to make but stalls for time. Deferring her university studies in Australia, she visits her father in Shanghai. In an exotic environment,...

The story of a young Albanian and a primitive Albania awakening into the modern world"Where are we going, where are they taking us?" The Second World War is about to start, but life for a young boy in a small town in Albania is still a game. Yet, as the...

The newest selection of essays from one of Australia's finest historians and writers.Agamemnon's Kiss is a thrilling selection of essays by one of Australia's most celebrated writers.Inga Clendinnen writes about everything from the books that terrified...

THE SECOND INSPECTOR CHALLIS AND SERGEANT DESTRY NOVEL An unidentified man is fished out of the sea with an anchor strapped to his waist. And for Detective Inspector Hal Challis, this sparks the beginning of a chilling series of shotgun killings. As...

In 2001 Text Publishing released Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten's A Gap in Nature, a moving and beautiful account of the extinction of around 100 species since Columbus. It was also published in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Korea and...

A wry and moving debut short story collection from an extraordinary new voice in American fiction, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere crackles with energy, wit and, ultimately, hope. ZZ Packer's characters are all too human in their struggle to find their own...

When Murray Whelan, lovelorn political minder and part-time fitness fanatic, is recruited to massage Australia's bid for the Olympics he has no idea how tough the going will get.Not even the sight of the gorgeous Holly Deloite in her taut blue leotard at...

Husbands and wives may say they are committed to equality. Yet, whether employed or not, wives still perform an astonishing share of the physical, emotional and organisational labour in marriage - everything from housework to 'sex work'. Wifework is a...

Mr Howard thanks for joining us. It's a pleasure. Have you calmed down yet I'm getting used to it a bit now, yes. It must just have been the biggest buzz. Did you ever think you'd win an Oscar? No I didn't, although it was a dream role. Why was it...

Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space is an hilarious erotic romp by Linda Jaivin, author of the best-selling Eat Me. The big bang was never so much fun.Baby, Doll and Lati, three spunky alien babes, are trapped on Nufon, the most boring planet in the...