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Large 9781922268358

Monkey Grip by Helen Garner

$19.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

Helen Garner's gritty, lyrical first novel divided the critics on its publication in 1977. Today, Monkey Gripis regarded as a masterpiece--the novel that shines a light on a time and a place and a way of living never before presented in Australian literature: communal households, music, friendships, chi ldren, love, drugs, and sex. When Nora falls in love with Javo, she is caught in the web of his addiction; and as he moves between loving her and leaving, between his need for her and promises broken, Nora's life becomes an intense dance of loving and trying to let go. Helen Garneris one of Australia's finest authors. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Her novels include Monkey Grip, The Children's Bach, Cosmo Cosmolinoand The Spare Room. I rolled and rolled in the water, deafening my ears while I thought of, and discarded, all the reasons why I shouldn't go. I popped up, hanging on to the rail, hair streaming on my neck. 'OK. I'll come.' Javo was looking at me. So, afterwards, it is possible to see the beginning of things, the point at which you had already plunged in, while at the time you thought you were only testing the water with your toe. 'Garner is a natural storyteller.' James Wood, New Yorker 'Her use of language is sublime.' Scotsman 'This is the power of Garner's writing. She drills into experience and comes up with such clean, precise distillations of life, once you read them they enter into you. Successive generations of writers have felt the keen influence of her work and for this reason Garner has become part of us all.' Australian 'Its embattled characters are so real that by the last page you feel not just that you have read a magnificent novel but that you have experienced life itself.' The Timeson The Spare Room 'What Garner offers in these novels is an alternative to the cloying metafiction of the late 20th century and the washed-out realism of the 21st. They are undeniably of their time - the 1970s commitment to the liberating possibilities of sex, drugs and communal living in Monkey Grip, the hangover nursed in the 1980s in The Children's Bach- but they also belong to a literary epoch we think of as long gone, as they earnestly strive to resurrect a modernist art of estrangement.' London Review of Books ...Show more

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Large 9781760875091

Damascus by Christos Tsiolkas

$32.99 AUD

Category: Fiction | Reading Level: Adult

Winner of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction 2020.   The stunningly powerful new novel from the author of The Slap. 'They kill us, they crucify us, they throw us to beasts in the arena, they sew our lips together and watch us starve. They bugger children in front of their mothers and vio late men in front of their wives. The temple priests flay us openly in the streets. We are hunted everywhere and we are hunted by everyone ...We are despised, yet we grow. We are tortured and crucified and yet we flourish. We are hated and still we multiply. Why is that? You have to wonder, how is it that we not only survive but we grow stronger?' Christos Tsiolkas' stunning new novel Damascus is a work of soaring ambition and achievement, of immense power and epic scope, taking as its subject nothing less than events surrounding the birth and establishment of the Christian church. Based around the gospels and letters of St Paul, and focusing on characters one and two generations on from the death of Christ, as well as Paul (Saul) himself, Damascus nevertheless explores the themes that have always obsessed Tsiolkas as a writer: class, religion, masculinity, patriarchy, colonisation, exile; the ways in which nations, societies, communities, families and individuals are united and divided - it's all here, the contemporary and urgent questions, perennial concerns made vivid and visceral.  In Damascus, Tsiolkas has written a masterpiece of imagination and transformation: an historical novel of immense power and an unflinching dissection of doubt and faith, tyranny and revolution, and cruelty and sacrifice.       ...Show more

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Large 9781863959933

Here Until August by Josephine Rowe

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

A masterful collection of heartbreak, travel and seduction from an internationally acclaimed Australian author. These superbly crafted stories follow the fates of characters who, by choice or by force, are travelling beyond the boundaries of their known worlds. We meet them negotiating reluctant departu res, navigating uncertain returns or biding the disquieting calm that often precedes decisive action. An agoraphobic French emigre watches disturbing terrorist footage as she minds a dog named Chavez. A young couple weather the interiority of a Montreal winter, more attuned to the illicit goings-on of their neighbours than to their own hazy, unfolding futures. A Melbourne writer of real-estate listings reflects on the stifling power of shared history as she wonders what life might be like over the fence. Other stories play out in places just beyond the brink of familiarity- flooded townships and distant lakes, sunlit woodlands or paths bright with ice, places of unpredictable access and spaces scrubbed from maps. From the Catskill Mountains to New South Wales, the abandoned island outports of Newfoundland to the sprawl of an Australian metropolis, this scintillating collection from one of Australia's most gifted writers shows us how the places we inhabit shape us in ways both remote and intimate. Praise for Josephine Rowe 'Her gorgeous, precise language encourages inner storms.' The New York Times Book Review   ...Show more

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Large 9781925818116

Empirical by Lisa Gorton

$24.00 AUD

Category: Poetry

The third poetry collection by Lisa Gorton, one of a small number of Australian writers who have won major literary awards for both poetry and fiction. Lisa Gorton began writing Empirical when the Victorian Government of the time threatened to cut an eight-lane motorway through the heart of Royal Park i n Melbourne. She walked repeatedly in the park, seeking to understand how the feeling for place originates, and how memory and landscape fold in and out of each other. The poems exploring this feeling for place are followed by a sequence which recreates the colonial history of Royal Park through the gathering of fragments from newspapers, maps and pictures, a different way of asserting its value, by demonstrating how a landscape can conceal the history of country beneath its layers of time. From this close-up study, in its second part the collection opens out into poems which meditate on ancient statues, Rimbaud's imperial panoramas, the making of Coleridge's poem 'Kubla Khan', the exhibition galleries of Crystal Palace - tracking, through chains of influence, and a phantasmagoric procession of images, the trade between empire, commodities and dreams of elsewhere. Empirical follows a deluxe promenade of thought, in which landscapes are mirrored and refracted in the contemporary Baroque style for which Gorton is renowned. ...Show more

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Large 9781925336979

The World Was Whole by Fiona Wright

$29.95 AUD

Category: Anthologies, Essays & Journals

The follow-up to Fiona Wright's essay collection Small Acts of Disappearance, - winner of the Nita B. Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for Non-fiction shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the NSW Premier's Award for Non-fiction. Our bodies and homes are our shelters, each one intimately a part of the other. But what about those who feel anxious, uncomfortable, unsettled within these havens? In The World Was Whole, Fiona Wright examines how we inhabit and remember the familiar spaces of our homes and suburbs, as we move through them and away from them into the wider world, devoting ourselves to the routines and rituals that make up our lives. These affectingly personal essays consider how all-consuming the engagement with the ordinary can be, and how even small encounters and interactions can illuminate our lives. Many of the essays are set in the inner and south-western suburbs of a major Australian city in the midst of rapid change. Others travel to the volcanic coastline of Iceland, the mega-city of Shanghai, the rugged Surf Coast of southern Victoria. The essays are poetic and observant, and often funny, animated by curiosity and candour. Beneath them all lies the experience of chronic illness and its treatment, and the consideration of how this can reshape and reorder our assumptions about the world and our place within it. ...Show more

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Large 9781925322743

Blue Lake: Finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp by David Sornig

$35.00 AUD

Category: Australian Non fiction

In Blue Lake,David Sornig examines how the 8km-square zone to the west of central Melbourne became the city's blind spot. Once a fertile wetland with a large blue saltwater lagoon, it passed through various incarnations- from boneyards and rubbish tips; through the Depression-era Dudley Flats shanty tow n; to the modern-day docks. Through it all, one thing that has persisted is its uncanny, liminal quality.As well as being a social history and a psychogeographic contemplation, Blue Lake is a biography of three specific characters- Elsie Williams, a Bendigo-born singer of Afro-Caribbean origin; Jack Peacock, the king of Dudley Flats? tip-scavenging economy; and Lauder Heinrich Rogge, a German hermit who lived for decades with sixty dogs on a stranded ship. By charting the rises and falls in their individual fortunes, Sornig reveals much about the race and class divides of their times and explores questions about those strange and singular places in the urban fabric where chaos is difficult to contain.In masterful prose, Sornig reveals cracks in the colonial mythology of the ordered vision of progressive, urban Melbourne - a place where identities, both personal and public, have never quite been resolved. In doing so, he encourages readers to look harder at the places they live in - at the streets they walk, the buildings they enter, the empty spaces they pass - and to see in them intricate layers of time and history that have been hidden from view. ...Show more

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Large 9781925603163

Quicksilver by Nicolas Rothwell

$22.99 AUD

Category: Anthologies, Essays & Journals

Quicksilverbegins on a quiet day in contemplation of a lizard deep in the heart of the outback but quickly moves to the Russia of Tolstoy and Gorky, and on to other lands and times, bringing into play universal questions about the essential nature of the human condition.Rothwell's chief subject is alway s the inland- the mystic Kurangara cult that flourished in the Kimberley; the story of the Western Desert artists, their works and their eventual fate; the tracks across the wilderness of Colonel Warburton and George Grey; the bush dreams and intuitions of D. H. Lawrence and the landscape word-portraits by the great biographer of nature Eric Rolls.In QuicksilverRothwell masterfully takes us in search of the sacred through place and time, in an enchanting reverie of calm wondering. ...Show more

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Large 9781925498738

Dancing with Strangers Text Classics by Inga Clendinnen

$12.95 AUD

Category: Australian Non fiction

Dancing with Strangers is Inga Clendinnen's seminal account of the moment in January 1788 when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Harbour and a thousand British men and women, some of them convicts and some of them free, encountered the Australians living there. 'These people mixed with ours,' wrote a Br itish observer after landfall, 'and all hands danced together.' What followed would shape relations between the peoples for the next two centuries. Winner, Kiriyama Prize 2004 Winner, Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction, NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2004 Winner, Best History Book, Queensland Premier's Literary Awards 2004 ...Show more

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Large 9780702239199

Mullumbimby by Melissa Lucashenko

$29.95 AUD

Category: Fiction

A darkly funny novel of romantic love and cultural warfare. When Jo Breen uses her divorce settlement to buy a neglected property in the Byron Bay hinterland, she is hoping for a tree change, and a blossoming connection to the land of her Aboriginal ancestors. What she discovers instead is sharp dissent from her teenage daughter Ellen, trouble brewing from unimpressed white neighbours, and a looming Native Title war among the local Bundjalung families. When Jo stumbles into love on one side of the Native Title divide she quickly learns that living on country is only part of the recipe for the Good Life. Told with humour and a sharp satirical eye, Mullumbimbyis a modern novel set against an ancient land. ...Show more

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Large 9781920882877

Anguli Ma: A Gothic Tale by Chi Vu

$24.00 AUD

Category: Fiction

Chi Vu takes the central figure in a traditional Buddhist folktale, a deranged killer who wears his victims’ fingers in a garland around his neck, and turns him into a menacing abbatoir worker who carries bloody chunks of meat home to his lodgings in plastic bags, in this suburban Gothic tale set in 198 0s Melbourne, when the flight of Vietnamese refugees to Australia was at its height. The novella gives a compelling insight into the relations formed between refugees who have been displaced from their families or their communities, and lead isolated lives haunted by suspicion and fear. At the same time the novella’s macabre humour and surreal effects point to redemptive possibilities, in demonstrating how these old fears are played out and resolved in their new settings. ...Show more

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Large 9780522855548

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead; Jonathan Franzen (Introduction by)

$32.99 AUD

Category: Fiction | Series: Miegunyah Modern Library Ser.

Sam and Henny Pollit have too many children, too little money, and too much loathing for one another. As Sam uses the children's adoration to feed his own voracious ego, Henny watches in bleak despair, knowing the bitter reality that lies just below his mad visions. A chilling novel of the relations bet ween parents and children, husbands and wives, The Man Who Loved Children is acknowledged as a contemporary classic. ...Show more

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Large tall man

The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island by Chloe Hooper

$24.99 AUD

Category: Australian Non fiction

The story of a death, a policeman, an island and a country.The Tall Manis the story of Palm Island, the tropical paradise where one morning Cameron Doomadgee swore at a policeman and forty minutes later lay dead in a watch-house cell. It is the story of that policeman, the tall, enigmatic Christopher Hu rley who chose to work in some of the toughest and wildest places in Australia, and of the struggle to bring him to trial. Above all, it is a story in luminous detail of two worlds clashing - and a haunting moral puzzle that no reader will forget.Selected for 'Best books of the year' lists by Ali Smith, Colm T ibin, Matt Condon, Peter Carey, Salon.com, The Globe & Mailand Dwight Garner in The New York Times. 'The country's finest work of literature so far this century. A haunting moral maze, described with such intimate observation and exquisite restraint that I kept pausing to take a breath and silently cheer the author ... I n her tale of the fatal collision between two 36-year-old males, black Cameron Doomadgee and white Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, Hooper ... has produced an Australian classic.' Robert Drewe, The Age'Hooper followed the case and its main characters for two and a half years, and she does their complexity a remarkable justice ... Extraordinary.' Alison McCulloch, New York Times Book Review'A gripping, heart-stopping piece of true-crime reportage ... Deserves the widest possible audience.' Brian Schofield, Sunday Times (UK) ...Show more

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