From 1941 to 1947, eighteen-thousand Italian prisoners of war were sent to Australia. The Italian surrender that followed the downfall of Mussolini had created a novel circumstance, prisoners who theoretically were no longer enemies. Many of these exiles were sent to work on isolated farms, unguarded. The Paperbark Shoe is the unforgettable story of Gin Boyle- an albino, a classically trained pianist, and a woman with a painful past. Disavowed by...

Two-time Booker-winner Carey (Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang) returns with a magnificent high-stakes art heist wrapped around a fraternal saga. Butcher Boone is an all-id all-the-time Australian painter of enormous talent and renown. Now divorced and bankrupted by his former wife, who tired of his excesses, Butcher has been reduced to caretaking a remote estate for his largest collector. And since the deaths of his working-class...

John Caldigate (1879) possesses in abundance the virtues of Trollope's writing: an engrossing story told by a worldly-wise, kindly, fair-minded narrator, and a tale strong on what Trollope claimed as the leading feature of his novels, "real" characters. But John Caldigate has some striking and distinctive calls on the reader's attention: Australian gold-mining scenes, the prominence given to matters of law and a criminal trial, and the stronger than...

Now a major motion picture, starring Simon Baker, Elizabeth Debicki, and Richard Roxburgh. Breath, by renowned Australian author Tim Winton, is a story of risk, of learning one's limits by challenging death. On the wild, lonely coast of Western Australia, two thrill-seeking teenage boys fall under the spell of a veteran big-wave surfer named Sando. Their mentor urges them into a regiment of danger and challenge, and the boys test themselves and...

"Fiendishly devious and addictively readable, Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake is a moral labyrinth constructed around the uneasy relationship between literature and lying. In steamy, fetid Kuala Lumpur in 1972, Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a London poetry journal, meets a mysterious Australian named Christopher Chubb. Chubb is a despised literary hoaxer, carting around a manuscript likely filled with deceit. But in this dubious manuscript Sarah...

Taboo takes place in the present day, in the rural South-West of Western Australia, and tells the story of a group of Noongar people who revisit, for the first time in many decades, a taboo place: the site of a massacre that followed the assassination, by these Noongar's descendants, of a white man who had stolen a black woman. They come at the invitation of Dan Horton, the elderly owner of the farm on which the massacres unfolded. He hopes that by...

What would you do if you turned on the television and saw you were the most wanted terrorist in the country? Gina Davies is about to find out when, after a night spent with an attractive stranger, she becomes a prime suspect in the investigation of an attempted terrorist attack.

"She who loves and runs away, lives to love another day" was Jacy Tiernan's credo. Only this fair-haired beauty had never loved again after Ian Yarbro. Ten years ago, she had fled her beloved Australian homestead with a shattered soul. Ian, the rugged sheep rancher who'd awakened her young heart to the most exquisite pleasures, had sired the child of another woman. Unable to forgive him, Jacy ran off to New York to live with her wealthy divorced mother,...

From the Nobel Prize—winning author of The Eye of the Storm comes a vivid, visceral tale of childhood friendship and sexual awakening from beyond the echoes of World War II. Sydney, Australia, 1942. Two children, on the cusp of adolescence, have been spirited away from the war in Europe and given shelter in a house on Neutral Bay, taken in by the charity of an old widow who wants little to do with them. The boy, Gilbert, has escaped the Blitz....

Following a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere, the inhabitants of a small Australian community wait for the inevitable aftereffects of the bombs to reach them.