General & literary fiction Books

Brian Castro's novel is set in the Dandenong Ranges in the years between the Depression and the Second World War.The story revolves around Swan Hay, born Shuang He, daughter of a country schoolteacher, her marriage to the passionate and brutal Darcy...

Shanghai Dancing is the most highly regarded and popular novel by multi-award winning Australian author, Brian Castro. In it, his fictional persona Antono Castro faces dispossession in Australia after the death of his parents. In an attempt to recover...

A Workingman's Cemetery unearths the contents of a small bone orchard in 41 short, fictional biographies. The histories of the interred, from a Hunter coalmining village now gone, are connected by the spectacularly unkempt life of Ronald Borthwick, the...

The fashion industry is killing the planet but I really need that new designer handbag...Her daughter is divorcing and she's going to die because of it... The mother must be medicated... I just want to be in Cyprus, why would I want to be in Australia.....

When Richard's campaign for dog food is trolled with hostile memes, he wants to celebrate. For three months, the London adman's been pushing increasingly risky themes in an effort to get sacked without losing his career-minded...

Mothers-in-law are famous for beingdifficult but when Nell marries Andy it's her father-in-law, Hal, who is theproblem. A corrosive force in his own family, Hal is a truly ugly Australianwho spreads his corruption whenever he gets the chance. Surviving...

The Director and the Daemon follows the director of a big budget Australian sci-fi TV show grappling with the dilemma of corporate sponsorship, and their infatuation with their beautiful but selfish lead star, Kit; and an unnamed young radical struggling...

Darlinghurst, Sydney: these are the days of strange rumours. Talk you can catch the gay plague from kissing, or from a mosquito bite. Talk of the government building a wall around 'Darlo' to keep the plague contained. Talk of old quarantine...

This is supposedly the fictional biography of a street storyteller by the name of Ah Sin active during the gold-digging days of the 1850s and 1860s in Victoria, Australia, told by Zhang Baohui, a mainland Chinese student working on a PhD thesis in...

The Interpretation of Cakes is like no other novel you have ever read and is one novel that you will never forget. It's 1916 and Isaak Brodsky has inherited his family's patisserie in the Jewish quarter of Budapest. Here, in the midst of shelves...

**Shortlisted, Miles Franklin Literary Award 2024**Saeed has not returned to Iran after publishing his novel The Imaginary Narrative of a Real Murder for fear of political persecution. He is surprised when Ismael, his father who has never left Iran,...

A wayward, wanton selection of stories grounded in displacement, desire, and the wish coursing through us to accede to the state of love. There is torment and illness, crude reality and distant fragrant places, peopled by characters that reside close to...

It is 1977 and Kate is a seventeen-year-old HSC student from Sydney's North Shore. She has dreams of becoming the next Ita Buttrose and editing Cleo. Yet while the 1970's was the time of free love and peace this movement has not yet hit Kate's suburban...

A woman sets out from a quiet corner of Glebe in Sydney towards the bustle of Broadway and Surry Hills, carrying with her the manuscript of a childhood friend who has recently died. Her thoughts surge between past and present as she strives to...

Pain was Joe Grim's self-expression, his livelihood and reason for being. In 1908-09 the Italian-American boxer toured Australia, losing fights but amazing crowds with his showmanship and extraordinary physical resilience.On the east coast Grim...

A still moment captured by a camera's shutter. The rapid fire of the mouse in a tight League of Legends match. The protracted sound of a door closing with finality.In the eighteenth edition of this creative anthology, twenty-six writers explore...

All lives have two things in common: they begin and they end.But within each life, there are thousands of little openings and little closings, all happening at once. The day you make the decision to move abroad; the moment a relationship comes to a...

Caroline Leakey, writing as Olin Keese, published her first and only novel, The Broad Arrow, in 1859. It tells the story of Maida Gwynnham, a young middleclass woman lured into committing a forgery by her deceitful lover, Captain Norwell, and then...

The Workingman's Paradise is set in the context of the defeat of the shearer's and maritime strikes of the early 1890's. The novel is essential reading for an appreciation of the context of the rise of the union movement in Australia. William Lane was...

Serialised in 1909-1910, The Poison of Polygamy is a rare gem of Australian literature. The first novel of the Chinese-Australian experience, it follows the fortunes of a young man who leaves his wife behind in southern China to seek his fortunes in the...

The Flight of Birds is a novel in twelve stories, each of them compelled by an encounter between the human and animal worlds. The birds in these stories inhabit the same space as humans, but they are also apart, gliding above us. The Flight of Birds...

Climate change is here, and how we react in the present will alter the course of the future; we can no longer deny that this is a key challenge for our times. Over the past two years, Australia has seen its worst bushfire season in recorded history,...

The Impersonators portrays the breakdown of family relationships and the endurance of love in a materialistic age sensitively, perceptively and humorously. When Sylvia Foley returns to Australia after twenty years, she finds her father, Jack...

A woman in my village gave me four prophecies...they have all come true, so far.Sia is a young Greek woman who has emigrated from Greece to Perth, Western Australia in 1945 for a better life. She carries with her four prophecies and four pieces of...

Based on the seventeenth-century journal of a shipwrecked Dutch sailor, and testimonies of surviving Korean 'Comfort Women,' Typhoon Kingdom is a story of war, romance, and survival that brings to life the devastating history of Korea at crucial...

We'll play this silly game, but we're not going into the army. We're not going to support this war. We'll do anything we can to stop it.Mark David visits a nursing home in search of a place for his elderly mother. There, he encounters the formidable...

Longlisted in the 2019 Indie Book Awards for Debut Fiction'A tale of dark family secrets, yet also a tale imbued with awe and wonder at life's mysteries. Prendergast vests her traumatised characters with dignity, and writes them with deep affection and...

Abraham Nevski is a dedicated and eccentric professor of medicine at the Royal Prince John Hospital. He prides himself on his diagnostic skills and powers of reasoning. On returning to work after a break he becomes aware of disturbing changes taking...

Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best First Book, Southeast Asia and South Pacific Region, Anthony Macris' highly-acclaimed debut novel Capital, Volume One takes the reader on an unforgettable journey through the...

By turns funny and moving, konkretion stages a dialogue around the romance of the Baader-Meinhof gang's revolutionary aspirations. Ex-commo Monique Piquet (aka Monica Picket) meets up in Paris with her former student, Angel Beigesang, who has just...

'You’ll fall in love with every single character' — Hayley MillsWhat happens when a quirky Australian town faces the imminent arrival of a huge fiery comet? Do the residents embrace all possibilities or run like hell?WARNING, WARNING, WARNINGCactus...

A truly innovative book for cat and kitten lovers — Oliver’s naughty and precocious perceptions of humans will delight, surprise and perhaps even shock you. Oliver Kitten was born in a firetruck and ends up living with a three-generation multicultural...

At fourteen, Cassie Wolphe’s way of life in Appalachia is being changed by the influx of modernity/postmodernity. She is in love with Jake McCollum, believes she will marry him and constructs her life around this central act, but like her brother, Ben,...

Alan Harrison is a perfectly ordinary, middle-class, middle-aged and happily married man. But when his wife, Susan, suddenly dies, his life starts to disintegrate. Rather than stay at home where the memory of his wife still haunts him, he decides to...

Suppose your more than mildly irritating leech of a sister calls you, as she usually does wanting money, only this time she says instead that she has cancer and in the course of the conversation challenges you to write the story of her life. You say,...

Abraham Jacobsen is misfit for this world. His peculiar gifts have cursed him with a past of good deeds he cannot escape, with dreams and visions he cannot explain, with a future as stone-set as the etchings on a grave marker. Now, just as he has found a...

This exquisite gift edition compiles Lovecraft's iconic Cthulhu mythos tales, featuring a silver embossed cover, ivory pages, and gilded edges. From 'The Call of Cthulhu' to 'The Shunned House,' these stories showcase Lovecraft's vivid imagination,...

In Henry James's poignant novella "The Beast in the Jungle," John Marcher lives in fear of a life-altering event, likening it to a lurking predator. This existential tale prompts reflection on life's ultimate meaning and our response upon its discovery...

The Angel’s Lamp, set in war-torn Ireland just after the Easter Rising, centers around a love affair between Johnny Flynn, an Irish-bred, English staff-sergeant in charge of the rebellion's soon-to-be executed leaders, and Nora Connolly, the firebrand...