Fiction
The following titles are organised alphabetically by author. There are books in the following genres:
Contemporary Australian
Crime
Historical
Literary
Military thriller
Young adult
For more information on any of the following authors or titles, please contact us via email or on (02) 9319 7199.
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MARION VON ADLERSTEIN
Title: The Freudian Slip
Publication: Hachette 2011
Genre: Women’s fiction/recent historical
Sydney, 1963. Three young women are taking on the world of advertising. Don Draper wouldn’t stand a chance. And Marion knows … she was there!
Early sixties in Sydney. Women wear princess-line dresses, edge-to-edge duster coats, gloves, perfectly matched handbags and shoes and seamed stockings. They are defined by the vital statistics of their bust, waist and hip measurements and if they are over thirty they re over the hill. Kings Cross is bohemian, Paddington is pre-gentrified and the crowd at Beppi s and the Ozone charge their boozy lunches to job numbers.
At the advertising agency Bofinger Adams Rawson & Keane, two talented women hold important creative roles. One, Bea, is a copywriter. The other, Desi, is a television producer. Because they are successful in their work and rewarded by it, few of their colleagues know how adept they are at mismanaging their private lives.
Anxious to join this starred twosome is a young secretary named Stella, who embodies all the qualities for success ambition, dedication, energy, efficiency except creative talent. In its absence she relies on stealth, flattery and plagiarism, to walk, in her Jane Debster toe-peepers, all over the others in realising her ambition.
She succeeds. At least, for a while …
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PATRICK ALLINGTON
Title: Figurehead
Publication: Black Inc, 2009
Genre: Recent historical fiction
Figurehead is a novel about Cambodia and the world. Seen through the eyes of ageing journalist Ted Whittlemore, it is also a speculative creation of the inner world of Nhem Kiry, a Khmer Rouge political figure complicit in crimes against humanity.
Ted Whittlemore, serial womaniser and once dashing, leftist journalist spent the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s wandering the battlefields of Korea and Vietnam, a confidante of Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk, a comrade of the left, and a close observer of Nhem Kiry – who would become the right hand man to Pol Pot.
These days Ted, after a serious health scare, is kicking his heels in an Australian retirement village, cranky, flirtatious and recalcitrant, but still keenly observing the rise and fall and rise again of the political figures – particularly Kiry – responsible for Cambodia.
Commissioned to write his memoirs, Ted finds himself imagining what is going on in Kiry’s head as the less than peaceful peace process is played out in Cambodia, and Kiry has to deal with the consequences of his own place in history.
As Ted writes a version of history as it may have seemed to Kiry, his long abandoned family relationships become more important to him and his once dearly held beliefs seem harder to hold onto.
Inspired by the real life characters of Wilfred Burchett and Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan, Figurehead is a very personal and moving account of the past few decades of Cambodian history and brings to vivid life what it might be to witness, and to play a part in the geopolitical diplomacy and murderous dealmaking of this turbulent period. Kiry’s and Ted’s points of view encompass the reality and the romance of ideology and history in the making and explore the gulf between how the world actually works and how individuals imagine it might work.
In giving life to Kiry and Ted, and to the real life Sihanouk, Kissinger, Castro, Pol Pot and more, Figurehead makes concrete the personalities, ideals and tragic mistakes of a complex and still unfolding story.
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LENNY BARTULIN
Title: A Deadly Business – OPTIONED
Title: The Black Russian
Publication: Scribe, 2010
Genre: Crime fiction
After yet another slow week at the cash register, that fine purveyor of second-hand literature, Susko Books, is facing financial ruin. Jack Susko sets off to a gallery in Woollahra to scrape up some coin with the sale of an old art catalogue. With his usual panache and exquisite timing, he arrives just as De Groot Galleries is being done over by masked thieves. Along with a mysterious object from the safe, the robbers seize a valuable first edition from Jack’s bag, too.
When the owner of the gallery doesn’t want to call the cops, Jack is offered a sizeable sum to keep silent: but when de Groot arrives at the bookshop with his heavy to renege on the deal, all bets are off. With an ease that almost constitutes a gift, Jack Susko finds himself at the centre of a world full of duplicity, lies and art theft.
Title: De Luxe
Publication: Scribe, 2011
Genre: Crime fiction
For once, Jack Susko is feeling pretty good: his secondhand bookshop is on the up, and the cops haven’t been around in ages. Even his cat, Lois, is being nice to him.
Then one morning a beautiful woman knocks on Jack’s door and hands him an eviction notice. His former boss, a corrupt property developer, asks for help with a particular situation and won’t take no for an answer. Throw in an ex-lover, her jealous boyfriend, half‑a‑dozen Playboy bunnies, a Nazi Luger and, of course, the police, and it’s safe to say that Jack’s favourable winds are quickly turning a little rough.
In his most thrilling and riotous adventure yet, De Luxe finds Jack Susko with all the odds against him … and nothing but bad cards to play.
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SAM DE BRITO
Title: The Lost Boys
Publication: Picador 2008
Genre: Contemporary Australian fiction
Ned is 15. He and his friends while away their days smoking dope, trying to root chicks and surfing at Maroubra. Ned’s life is only just beginning – tomorrow, some time.
Ned is 35. He and his mates drift through the days snorting cocaine, trying to root chicks, clinging to the pub and surfing at Bondi. For Ned, this is it – tomorrow never came.
What happens when life passes you by? When the drugs no longer work and the promise of the future has become the wreckage of the past? What happens when a generation of men lose their way?
Confrontingly honest, blackly funny, THE LOST BOYS is a compelling look at the dark side of being a 21st century man from a powerful new voice in fiction.
Title: Hello Darkness
Publication: Picador 2011
Genre: Contemporary Australian fiction
In Ned Jelli’s family, journalism and siren-chasing in the news pit of Sydney is in the genes. And everyone knows, you can’t escape your genes, or your family. At 39, Ned’s life has come full circle and he finds himself back in the news empire where he started his career at 19. And for a lost boy like Ned, where 20 years have been spent eddying around the same small course of Bondi, babes, and booze, this is the final sign he’s going nowhere fast.
Held back by his own fear and loathing, and searching for the perfect woman to fill the black hole where his heart should be, Ned continues the fatal and often fatally funny trajectory he began in The Lost Boys.
Set among the newsrooms of Sydney, Hello Darkness is a sharp, demonic expose of the world of journalism from an insider, exploring the cost of being less than you hoped you would, and wishing for what is beyond your reach.
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SHARLENE MILLER BROWN
Title: The Retreaters
Publication: ABC Books 2008
Genre: Fiction
After losing both her only living relative and her hearing under mysterious circumstances, Liv attempts to escape the ensuing rumours by taking a live-in job at a secluded wine country retreat fifteen kilometres outside her town. Here she finds herself surrounded by an array of ‘misfits’, including Jake; a young boy captivated by what he believes is his sister’s ghost, and Mason, an elusive gardener with a hidden past. As Liv begins to uncover the reasons behind her unexplained deafness, so too do the pasts of her colleagues begin to unravel, until the point is reached where emotions can no longer be denied or secrets kept.
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JJ COOPER
Title: The Interrogator
Publication: Random House 2009
Genre: Military thriller
After Jay Ryan, the Australian Army’s most experienced interrogator, ends up on the other side of the table facing a sadistic superior officer, he embarks on a white-knuckle flight from everything and everyone he trusts, pursued by foes who were once friends and with his one clear ally, his father, missing. Enter Sarah Evans, a secret agent assigned to make sure he comes to no harm – or so Jay thinks …
According to Greek Mythology, Aphrodite had a wayward eye and a loyal son. When Eros gave Harpocrates a rose to keep quiet about his mother’s little indiscretions, the rose became a symbol for secrecy. This is a story Jay Ryan has never heard – until his hand is nailed to a table and a red rose tattooed onto his wrist.
Jay is an interrogator with a dark past and a tortured soul; he’s also the keeper of secrets Israeli spies will kill to get their hands upon. Renowned for his skills, he is used to commanding a certain level of respect amongst his peers. Then one day Jay is drugged, tortured, tattooed and accused of rape. He is forced to reveal information that could further destabilise fragile Middle East relations and plunge the entire region into war. They are secrets he has struggled to keep hidden for four years.
The Interrogator is a story of betrayal and nightmarish conspiracy firmly rooted in the highest levels of government across international alliances. The story rockets toward a shattering finale that will leave the survivors changed forever. Thriller fans will enjoy the colourful characters, twisting, turning plots and fast action. The authentic military details gives the story a chillingly real context, drawing the reader into Jay’s world and not letting us go until the very end.
Title: Deadly Trust
Publication: Random House 2010
Genre: Military thriller
Former army interrogator Jay Ryan is enjoying the quiet life after leaving the military far behind – or so he thinks. Because old habits die hard and he’s quickly thrust back into the thick of things when a disgruntled scientist, backed by the Australian security industry, develops a weapon of mass destruction – a hybrid strain of Anthrax – to be used to create panic in a population apathetic to crime prevention.
Only one batch of Anthrax inoculations can resist the deadly new strain, and it was given to five military interrogators. One of them was Jay Ryan. When the other four disappear, Ryan is the last interrogator left with the antibodies to defeat the deadly Anthrax strain.
Racing against time and hunted by rogue soldiers, mad scientists and an organisation that operates beyond the law, Ryan digs deep into his past for a chance at a future.
In this heartstopping thriller, Jay Ryan wages a one-man war against enemies both known and unseen. There’s only person he can trust – or can he? Winning the war may have devastating consequences for the last interrogator …
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VIRGINIA DUIGAN
Title: The Biographer
Publication: Vintage, 2008
Genre: Women’s fiction
Twenty-five years later, Tony, a young American art critic, has been researching a biography of Mischa and arrives in their small hilltop community. Greer is consumed by anxiety, fearing The Biographer may have unearthed something that happened as a consequence of her meeting Mischa, a buried secret she had intended to write out of her life story.
Greer and Tony play out a gripping cat-and-mouse game in which she tries to glean who he has spoken to and what, if anything, he knows, while he lets drop, with calculated casualness, graded snippets of information designed to keep her guessing.
As her hand is forced, Greer embarks on a tense journey of her own. through Tony’s artful interrogations and her own diary, she is compelled to put her youthful self on trial. In the process she makes a life-changing discovery.
Title: The Precipice
Publication: Vintage, 2011
Genre: Women’s fiction
Thea Farmer, a reclusive and difficult retired school principal, lives in isolation with her dog in the Blue Mountains. Her distinguished career ended under a cloud over a decade earlier, following a scandal involving a much younger male teacher. After losing her savings in the financial crash, she is forced to sell the dream house she had built for her old age and live on in her dilapidated cottage opposite.
Initially resentful and hostile towards Frank and Ellice, the young couple who buy the new house, Thea develops a flirtatious friendship with Frank, and then a grudging affinity with his twelve-year-old niece, Kim, who lives with them. Although she has never much liked children, Thea discovers a gradual and wholly unexpected bond with the half-Vietnamese Kim, a solitary, bookish child from a troubled background.
Her growing sympathy with Kim propels Thea into a psychological minefield. Finding Frank’s behaviour increasingly irresponsible, she becomes convinced that all is not well in the house. Unsettling suspicions, which may or may not be irrational, begin to dominate her life, and build towards a catastrophic climax.
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Y.A. ERSKINE
Title: The Brotherhood
Publication: Random House, 2011
Genre: Crime fiction
When Sergeant John White, mentor, saviour and all-round good guy is murdered during a routine callout, the tight-knit world of Tasmania Police is rocked to the core.
An already difficult investigation into the death of one of their own becomes steeped in political complexities when the main suspect is identified as Aboriginal and the case, courtesy of the ever-hostile local media, looks set to make Palm Island resemble a Sunday afternoon picnic in comparison. And as the investigation unfolds through the eyes of the sergeant’s colleagues, friends, family, enemies and the suspect himself, it becomes clear that there was a great deal more to John White — and the squeaky-clean reputation of the nation’s smallest police service — than ever met the eye.
The Brotherhood is a novel about violence, preconceptions, loyalties, corruption, betrayal and the question a copper should never need to ask: just who can you trust?
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CAROLINE HAMILTON
Title: Consumed
Publication: ABC Books 2008
Genre: Debut fiction
**Winner, AWS Christina Stead Award 2009**
Amelia wants to be the best cook in the world. Helping her is Katarina, a wise and enigmatic woman who hands down age-old recipes that mysteriously reveal people’s innermost secrets when they taste these magical dishes. When Katarina is killed, Amelia is unprepared for what is to follow. Amelia is bequeathed everything that Katarina has ever owned; her house, her recipes, her cats, even her personality. Amelia also discovers that strange and ancient forces are at work, propelling her to wreak a tasty but savage revenge on Katarina’s murderer. A literary feast for the senses, Consumed is an enthralling story of gluttony, madness, bottled tomatoes and a woman who will stop at nothing in her search for the perfect recipe.
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HELEN HODGMAN
Title: Blue Skies
Publication: Text 2011 (new edition)
Genre: Contemporary Australian
A young wife and mother watches a clock that seems forever stuck at three-in-the-afternoon. Her neighbour obsesses over the front lawn, and the women at the local beach chatter about knitting patterns. Her husband didn’t come home last night.
She lives for Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the baby is with Mother-in-law and she can escape to a less humdrum life. Jonathan, man about town, is Tuesday. Ben, a freethinking artist, is Thursday.
But Jonathan is in serious trouble, and Thursdays are turning sour. Very sour.
A brilliant, acerbic tale of a crack-up in stultifying suburbia, Blue Skies marked the emergence of a unique voice in Australian fiction.
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BELINDA JEFFREY
Title: Brown Skin Blue
Publication: University of Queensland Press, 2009
Genre: Young adult fiction
My mum’s skin is white, my skin is brown and I have a blue birthmark.
Two secrets rule my life. One is something I need to know and the other is something I need to forget. They won’t let me go.
Some people say you can’t death roll with a beast that has already survived a million years and live to tell the story. Or can you?
‘A compelling story, powerfully told.’ Nick Earls
‘Belinda Jeffrey’s first novel Brown Skin Blue for young adult readers is a tale chosen by many in the book industry as one to watch.’ The Courier-Mail
Title: Big River Little Fish
Publication: University of Queensland Press, 2010
Genre: Young adult fiction
2011 Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Young Adult Book: Shortlisted
2011 Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature: Shortlisted
From the moment Tom Downs was born backwards – the moment of his mother’s death – time has held him the wrong way round, like he’s caught inside a fractured story.
But the thing about Tom’s town flooding, and the thing that takes him by suprise is not what Old Mother Murray takes away, but who she brings back.
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KATHERINE JOHNSON
Title: Pescador’s Wake
Publication: HarperCollins, 2009
Genre: Contemporary Australian fiction
The Uruguayan-flagged Pescador has been spotted fishing illegally for Patagonian toothfish in the waters off Heard Island. The crew of an Australian patrol vessel, the Australis, has been given instructions to pursue the Pescador and not let her out of its sight. Equally determined, Carlos, the Pescador’s master, sets an escape course south, directly into a storm. But the Australian boat in hot pursuit is not only the source of anxiety among the crew of Pescador. Each has his own secrets and ambitions.
As the drama unfolds at sea, so too do the stories of the human lives caught in its nets. For the men on board the boats, and the women they’ve left behind on shore, there is much at stake.
In this gripping debut novel, Katherine Johnson evokes the danger and heartbreak of lives at the mercy of the sea, and weaves a breathtaking story of love, loss and hope.
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MIREILLE JUCHAU
Title: Burning In
Publication: Giramondo, 2007
Genre: Literary fiction
Nominated for The Australia-Asia Literary Award 2008
Shortlisted Prime Minister’s Literary Award 2008
Shortlisted Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2008
Shortlisted Age Book of the Year Award 2008
Shortlisted Nita B. Kibble Award 2008
Highly Commended Barbara Jefferis Award 2008
When seven year old Ruby Hartmann disappears in New York’s Central Park, her Australian mother, Martine, packs a bag and goes to live in the park. After she uncovers what has happened to Ruby, Martine is eventually able to understand the sacrifices her own mother was forced to make, in order to save her life in Nazi Germany.
While sifting through old family photos, Martine, a photographer, discovers a secret about her Jewish mother that takes her back to Australia and then to Germany. What, or who, did her mother leave behind when she fled the city in 1938? The novel’s final scenes occur in contemporary Berlin, where Martine confronts the uncanny parallels between her own life and its losses, and those suffered by her mother.
Structured around two mysteries and three generations of Jewish women, Burning In is a beautifully written psychological novel, an extended meditation on loss, which explores the long shadows cast by the past on the present, and the links between parental love and the imperatives of survival. The author has an extraordinary eye for detail, and an unerring instinct for the rhythm of thought and feeling.
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JOHN LONIE
Title: Murder on Tiger Road
Genre: Historical crime
Unpublished
Murder on Tiger Road is a dramatic, fast-paced crime story with an intriguing and ever-deepening protagonist at its heart. Set in the highly stratified social world of British Malaya between the wars, it explores the place of an outsider with inside knowledge – a Chinese man with the passport of an Oxford legal education. It’s about a man bridging multiple identities whilst constrained by secrets that have no place in his the world he knows.
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P.M. NEWTON
Title: The Old School
Publication: Penguin, 2010
Genre: Crime fiction
Sydney, 1992. Nhu ‘Ned’ Kelly is a young detective making her way in what was, until recently, the best police force money could buy. Now ICAC has the infamous Roger Rogerson in the spotlight, and the old ways are out. Ned’s sex and background still make her an outsider in the force, but Sydney is changing, expanding, modernising, and so is the Job.
When two bodies are found in the foundations of an old building in Sydney’s west, Ned is drawn into the city’s past: old rivalries, old secrets and old wrongs. As she works to discover who the bones belong to – and who dumped them there – she begins to uncover secrets that threaten to expose not only the rotten core of the police force, but also the dark mysteries of her own family.
P.M. Newton worked in the New South Wales Police Force for thirteen years. Her debut is both a gripping crime novel and a brilliant portrait of Sydney’s recent past.
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THEA WELSH
Title: The President’s Wife
Publication: HarperCollins, 2010
Genre: Contemporary women’s fiction
Beth Wilford is one of the most famous women in the world.
Her youth, charisma and freshness have endeared her to thousands. Photographers lay siege to her family home. She is followed everywhere.
But who is she? Young, beautiful, with an impeccable political pedigree, she is the woman in love with Marshall Avery, the next President of the United States. And while Beth has the poise not to falter under the barrage of flashbulbs, it can′t protect her from a would-be assassin′s bullet …
Sharp, witty, insightful and unputdownable, THE PRESIDENT′s WIFE is not only a suspenseful story of a public marriage and private anguish, and a telling account of political spin and manipulation, it is also an examination of the way certain women — like Diana, Jackie and Evita — become icons who exercise an enduring fascination in the lives of millions.