Set among the surf and sandhills of the Australian beach – and the tidal changes of three generations of the Lang family – The Bodysurfers is an Australian classic. A short-story collection which has become a bestseller and been adapted for film, television, radio and the theatre, The Bodysurfers on its first publication marked a major change in Australian literature.
Our Sunshine is the tale of a man whose story outgrew his life. Robert Drewe's strikingly imaginative re-creation of the inner life of Ned Kelly is written with a brilliant clarity and impressionistic economy. It carries the reader into a dreamworld of astonishing and violent revelation, an entrancing and frightening landscape of murder, sexuality, persecution, robbery, vanity, politics, and corruption.
Haunted by the brutal murder of a local couple, David heads to his weekend shack with his new lover, Lydia, and his children from his recently crumbled marriage. Together they find escape, if only briefly, in the ocean and the bush. The Bodysurfers, the title story of Robert Drewe's classic first collection, is a vivid evocation of love, passion, terror and the beauty of the beach.
Junk is not, like alcohol or a weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life. In his debut novel, Junky, Burroughs fictionalized his experiences using and peddling heroin and other drugs in the 1950s into a work that reads like a field report from the underworld of post-war America. The Burroughs-like protagonist of the novel, Bill Lee, see-saws between periods of addiction and rehab, using a panoply of substances including heroin, cocaine, marijuana, paregoric (a weak tincture of opium) and goof balls (barbiturate), amongst others. For this definitive edition, renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has gone back to archival typescripts to re-created the author's original text word by word. From the tenements of New York to the queer bars of New Orleans, Junky takes the reader into a world at once long-forgotten and still with us today. Burroughs’s first novel is a cult classic and a critical part of his oeuvre.
An intricately woven, suspenseful novel of psychological and political intrigue, The Tesseract follows the interlocking fates of three sets of characters in the Philippines: gangsters in a chase through the streets of Manila; a middle-class mother putting her children to bed in the suburbs and remembering her first love; and a couple of street kids and the wealthy psychiatrist who is studying their dreams. Alex Garland demonstrates the range of his extraordinary talents as a novelist in this national bestseller, a Chinese puzzle of a novel about three intersecting sets of characters in the Philippines.
The first novel written about the bushcountry gunslinger who was both the national hero and devil incarnate of Australia, Ned Kellyimagines the inner life of a figure described by historian Manning Clark as "a wild ass of a man, snarling, roaring and frothing like a ferocious beast when the tamer entered the cage." Written with brilliant clarity and impressionistic economy, Ned Kellyfollows Kelly and his outlaw gang of "bushrangers" through the wild land of Australia as they declare war on the police, the bankers, the squatters, the teachers, the preachers, the railway, and the electric telegraph-carrying readers into a dream world of astonishing and violent revelation.
Have fun at the beach! In this easy reader, kids will have fun seeing photographs and reading about the fish that live in the ocean, sand castles on the beach, and birds in the sky.
*WINNER OF THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR* Fever Pitch is Nick Hornby's million-copy-selling, award-winnning football classic 'A spanking 7-0 away win of a football book. . . inventive, honest, funny, heroic, charming' Independent For many people watching football is mere entertainment, to some it's more like a ritual; but to others, its highs and lows provide a narrative to life itself. But, for Nick Hornby, his devotion to the game has provided one of few constants in a life where the meaningful things - like growing up, leaving home and forming relationships, both parental and romantic - have rarely been as simple or as uncomplicated as his love for Arsenal. Brimming with wit and honesty, Fever Pitch, catches perfectly what it really means to be a football fan - and in doing so, what it means to be a man. 'Hornby has put his finger on truths that have been unspoken for generations' Irish Times 'Funny, wise and true' Roddy Doyle
