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In 1957, when piano teacher Ilona Talivaldis arrived in the sleepy little town of Jingera, she was mocked as the 'reffo from Latvia'. Now, just four years on, she and her fourteen-year-old daughter Zidra are at the heart of the community. But when Ilona becomes involved in the plights of two very different children she puts this peaceful life in jeopardy. For Ilona's sensitive young protege , Philip, is slowly being crushed by relentless bullying at Sydney's exclusive Stambroke College. With his wealthy parents turning a blind eye,... read more

A devastatingly powerful and memorable novel for readers of The Memory Keeper's Daughter.
On a stormy night in small-town America, a couple, desperate and soaked to the skin, knock on a stranger's door. When Martha, a retired schoolteacher living a safe and conventional life, answers their knock, her world changes forever. For they are fugitives. Lynnie, a young woman with an intellectual disability, and Homan, a deaf man with only sign language to guide him, have escaped together from The School for the Incurable and... read more

A collection of Maeve Binchy's wonderful, heartwarming stories celebrating the joys and travails of travel.

A wedge is driven between a husband and wife when a mysterious stranger arrives, claiming to have grown up in their home. After agreeing to marry a beautiful, headstrong Russian immigrant in exchange for a promotion, a bus boy turned waiter finds himself entangled in a web of organized crime. A strange confluence of circumstances at the end of an ordinary workday causes a man to go off the grid, living off what he can forage in the same affluent suburb where he once lived comfortably with his family. These and the other mesmerizin... read more

In The Best Australian Stories 2011, Cate Kennedy selects the year's most outstanding short fiction. Featuring much loved masters as well as exciting new voices, this book is a perfect introduction to Australia's best contemporary fiction. Previous contributors include Nam Le, Kate Grenville, David Malouf, Tim Winton, Mandy Sayer, DBC Pierre, Frank Moorhouse, Karen Hitchcock, Peter Goldsworthy, Marion Halligan, Venero Armanno and many more.

Silence is an exquisite, poignant collection of 'fictions' by one of Australia's finest writers. Each piece has its own startling imagery. This is a book that constantly surprises with its echoes of famous voices, and how the astonishing breadth of material - historical, personal, imagined - is held together by its central theme and by a web of subtle connections. Rodney Hall is one of Australia's finest writers. He has won the Miles Franklin Award twice for Just Relations and The Grisly Wife and many of his novels and poems have b... read more

Australia's best short stories the definitive collection. Each year, The Best Australian Stories anthology showcases the country's most exciting short fiction. Short stories have enjoyed a remarkable renaissance in the years since the series began, and some of today's most celebrated short-fiction writers made their debuts in this much-loved annual. In 2011, Black Inc. presents the best of the best the best Australian short stories of the past decade. By turns comic and heartbreaking, devastatingly realistic and dazzlingly inventiv... read more

In this collection, acclaimed writer Mandy Sayer brings together nine of the best Australian examples of the long story - tales that combine the intensity of the short story with the complexity of a novel. In these stories, characters grow up, hook up and break up, endure calamitous loss and discover delectable love, travel to faraway places and find themselves right back where they started. From the exotic to the familiar, the sensuous to the dangerous, these soaring flights of the imagination boldly traverse the vast terrain of h... read more

'American literature and the short story might be said to have come of age at about the same time, and this, along with something in the bustling and energetic American temperament, might go some way towards explaining why the two go together as well as they do'. This title includes twenty-one short stories from some of the best American writers over the last two hundred years that provide a mesmerizing, multi-faceted portrait of a country, a people and the unique literature produced by this most exuberant of nations.

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Maeve Binchy is one of the world's best loved story tellers. This collection from Australia and around the world gives us stories that are sad and happy, thoughtful and humourous, but always abounding with the author's trade mark generosity of spirit. Families, friends, lovers and the lonely, all are drawn with affection and wisdom.

This book contains a collection of nature poems and art work, lovingly designed and crafted by Melbourne-based artist, Bee Williamson. The work huddles around her love of Nature, where she finds peace, joy and the inspiration to write and draw, deep within the source and solace of nature's gentle hand. Her grandfather, acclaimed nature writer Henry Williamson, encouraged Bee, through his undeniable spiritual presence, to reveal her deep expresison and concerns within this work, her second ublished book, "Nature - a gift". The simpl... read more

Growing up in a mining community in rural South Wales, Huw Morgan is taught many harsh lessons. Looking back, where difficult days are faced with courage and the valleys swell with the sound of Welsh voices, it becomes clear that there is nowhere so green as the landscape of his own memory.

"A remarkable tour de force. Better than any translator of our time, Fagles catches the relentless sweep of the original...Bernard Knox's introduction to the poem is a masterpiece no reader, however sophisicated, can afford to miss" Maynard Mack, Yale University

This is a collection of four comical stories by Roald Dahl. It includes "The Visitor" and "Bitch", two extracts from the notorious diairies of Oswald Hendryks Cornelius. In "The Great Switcheroo" and "The Last Act", the danger and power of desire is explored.

I'm a lucky woman, thinks Susanna Greenfield. And why wouldn't she? Her handsome, successful husband is a loving father to their two teenage children. Her mother is her dearest friend, and her scatty but adored younger sister seems to have finally found some stability in her life. Susanna has a solid career as an art teacher, and if, as she has recently discovered, there's a hole inside her where her creative spirit used to be is that really such a big price to pay? But beneath the carefully maintained surface, seismic forces are a... read more

Standing on the fringes of life... offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor. This haunting novel about the dilemma of passivity vs. passion marks the stunning debut of a provocative new voice in contemporary fiction: "The Perks of Being a Wallflower." This is the story of what it's like to grow up in high school. More intimate than a diary, Charlie's letters are singular and unique, hilarious and devastating. We may not know where he lives. We may not know to whom he is wri... read more

In the second instalment of The Conclave of Shadows. The Conclave demands its membership price from their new protege: Tal must gather information on the sinister magician Laso Varen. But, to do this means service with the sorcerer's master, Duke Kaspar of Olasko -- the very man he suspects of killing his family.

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