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Alexander Otto has it all - eminence as a surgeon, admiring colleagues, a loving family. Yet from the opening lines of this modern tragedy, he is a man on the run. What secrets lie beneath the successful veneer of Alexander Otto's life? Edwina Frye is Otto's biographer, she is also having an affair with him. As she writes the official biography, she writes a parallel life of Alexander which develops into a disturbing fiction of betrayal and revenge. UNDER THE KNIFE does not take comfortable sides as it swings between the slippery poles of truth and fiction, love and obsession, resplendent public achievements and unpardonable private transgressions.

By the firelight, a mysterious storyteller weaves a captivating tale of sea journeys, vampire women, and Aboriginal Dreaming. Around the campfire the gold diggers listen and journey with George as he plunges underground to rescue his ship's captain from the horrific and mesmerising vampire woman.

Jangamuttuk, the Master of the Ghost Dreaming, sends his son, George, to rescue Wadawaka from the 'ghost' vampire woman who has taken him as her 'Dark Lord' and imprisoned him in her underground kingdom. Will George, in either his human form or as his Dreaming animal-self Dingo, be able to withstand Amelia's powers; will he survive the underground caverns; can he tear Wadawaka and himself from the violent but seductive power of the vampire woman? And who is the strange but familiar ghost woman accompanying the new colonial governor?

Underground is the 3rd in the Master of The Ghost Dreaming quartet, beautifully and insistently portrays the enduring reality of Aboriginal Dreaming in a fascinating story of initiation, maternal longing, and colonial violence.

It's 1988 and Germany is a country still at war with its own recent history.

Australian expat journalist Caroline James, sexually entranced by her German lover, goes to live with him near Stuttgart.

But Caroline soon misses the job and London life she gave up to be with Karl, and discovers the darker side of romance with an obsessive man.

It also doesn't take long to realise they have little in common beyond mutual sexual passion.

So why doesn't she leave?

Is there more to her decision to stay, than the lead on a potential news story?

A local woman accused of killing her own child seems to be the victim of simmering prejudices until Caroline's research unearths dark secrets from Germany's recent history.

Caroline's professional curiosity turns personal as every investigative step she takes drags her deeper into the horrors of the past.

Unnaturals tried to kill Mason Douglas and his family.

Big mistake.

He became The Butcher, a cold relentless Hunter with a vendetta that took him across the world.

And now, on his return home to Australia - to mend his heart, soul and family - his destiny collides with a millennia-old struggle between strange Gods. Their prize is Earth. Their warriors are warring races of Unnaturals: the Bloodells and the Darkells.

As an unlikely alliance forms between Natural and Unnatural - between the Douglas clan and the Darkells - Mason's family grows in unexpected ways... not all of whom are human.

Sparks fly, lust inspires, and love ignores all the boundaries as the very definition of family changes.

Prepare to push your boundaries.

Is she a killer?

Libby Daniels wakes from a drug-induced sleep to see two men crouched over her mother's battered body. Already in shock, she flees when overhearing the men say, 'Libby killed her'.

His past will put them both in danger...

Conor Martin can't ignore the woman who takes refuge on his doorstep. He's been alone too long, hiding too long, afraid too long, not to recognise her desperation... and her need for love.

Trust is hard to give...

until past and present collide in a violent attack that forces them to confront their enemies... and their deepest fears.

Arthur William Upfield is well known as the creator of Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (Bony) who features in 29 crime detection novels, most set in the Australian outback. It is not well known that he also wrote about 250 short stories and articles, drawing on his experiences in the bush between 1911 and 1931.

Up and Down Australia is the first published collection of Upfield's short works. Kees de Hoog has selected 33 fiction stories, including the only known Bony short story. There are humorous yarns, crime stories, comedies and dire tales about the dangers of living and working in the bush.

You will not simply be entertained and informed by reading these stories, but you will sample life in the Australian outback during the early decades of the twentieth century.

The Answerth family's mansion seems to deserve its nickname of Venom House - perhaps because of its forbidding setting, an island in the centre of a man-made lake, its treacherous waters studded by the skeletons of long-dead trees. Perhaps it's because of the unquiet ghosts of the Aboriginals slaughtered by the Answerth ancestors. Whatever the reason, most people are content to give Venom House and its occupants a wide berth... until a couple of corpses turn up in the lake...

 

The strength of Upfield's accomplishment in this book is so overwhelming it makes the reader cower. The characters are well-developed, the conversation vernacular for the Australian outback, and the development compelling. The story is the nearest Upfield comes to a story that would have made Edgar Allen Poe envious, Upfield maintains a kind of corpse-like humour which is very amusing... The whole book is first-class Upfield and first-class crime fiction. - from The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.

Waiting is a story of two odd couples in prose as marvellously idiosyncratic as its characters.

Big is a hefty cross-dresser and Little is little. Both are long used to the routines of boarding house life in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, but Little, with the prospect of an inheritance, is beginning to indulge in the great Australian dream, which has Big worried. Little's cousin, Angus, is a solitary man who designs lake-scapes for city councils, and strangely constructed fireproof houses for the bushfire zone. A handy man, he meets Jasmin an academic who races in her ideas as much as in her runners. Her head is set on publishing books on semiotics and her heart is turned towards her stalled personal life. All four are waiting, for something if not someone.

'Philip Salom and I once watched a golf tournament together. A mutual friend was caddying and we talked along the fairways, discussed things in the long grass and conversed among the trees to the sound of light applause. I knew Philip was a poet but it was obvious to me by the final round that he was also a wonderful storyteller. As you are about to see, I was right.' - John Clarke

'Philip Salom's Waiting is a strangely compelling bittersweet tale of the marginalised and the searching. From a rooming house to the world of academia, the novel shimmers with a cast of larger-than-life characters - Big and Little, Angus and Jasmin. Weirdly moving, tender, and insightful.' - Antoni Jach

'Stories with flashes of poetry and sudden insight and such profound compassion that they should be labelled 'WARNING: Could make the reader kinder.' Send a copy to a politician.' - Sue Woolfe

For ten years during the 1950s and 60s the British conducted secret nuclear tests on Australian tribal lands. The cancer and radiation poisoning resulting from these tests led to the deaths of countless aborigines. B. Wongar uses these tests as the starting point for a powerful trilogy about the destruction of a culture and a land. 'Walg', the first of these novels, is told from the point of view of an aboriginal woman. Pregnant, travelling on foot through a landscape destroyed by nuclear blasts and mining, she seeks her tribal country - her 'walg' (womb) - to learn the secrets of motherhood which might help her prolong the life of her decimated tribe.

'Walg' is the first book of B. Wongar's highly acclaimed 'nuclear trilogy'. 'Karan' and 'Gabo Djara', the second and third books, are also available, and the trilogy has since been extended with the addition of a prequel 'Manhunt', and two further books, 'Raki' and 'Didjeridu Charmer'.

Lissa Wilson's life hasn't been quite the same since people she cared about started getting themselves killed.

By vampires.

And Lissa learnt that the opposite of life is not always death. On the plus side, she made a new friend.

Gary Hooper may be the worst best-friend a librarian could have - and easily the worst vampire ever - but he has taught Lissa the real meaning of life.

Gary's worldview has also improved remarkably since meeting Lissa, but all that could be lost if she discovers what services he provides Melbourne's undead community.

Meanwhile, as their friendship brings him closer to the humanity he lost, it also puts them both in grave danger.

And there's a big chance that the evil stalking them could them both killed - in his case, for good this time.

A woman returns to Australia to clear out her father’s house, with an eye to transforming the contents into an art installation in the tradition of the revered Chinese artist Song Dong. What she hasn’t reckoned with is the tangle of jealousies, resentments, and familial complications that she had thought, in leaving the country, she had put behind her — a tangle that ensnares her before she arrives.

Walter Kovak - insurance worker, early forties, unhappily married, no children, memorably invisible - is the sole survivor of a devastating suburban train crash. But Walter has no memory of the tragedy.

One year on he starts to receive mysterious random warnings from strangers - warnings that could again save his life. And his memory of the fateful day begins to return.

Ashley Sievwright lives, works and writes in Melbourne. His first novel, The Shallow End, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best First Book in 2009.

Reviews of The Shallow End:

'... an impressively fresh voice in Australian fiction... The Shallow End is a little gem of a novel and deserves to be widely read.' - The Canberra Times

'Both witty and easy to read... filled with moments of droll sagacity... evocative prose and cynical humour are Sievwright's strengths...' - Australian Book Review

War of the Worlds: Battleground Australia sheds fresh, Antipodean light on H.G. Wells' original tale in stories that traverse the southern continent.

Home to the planet's longest-surviving mysteries, Australia now plays victim to marauding Martians in this outstanding collection of exciting stories set in the past, present and future.

 

It is well-known that Wells found vital inspiration for his 1897 novel in the horrific plight of Tasmanian Aboriginals who, within his lifetime, were virtually wiped out by the warfare and disease brought by foreign invaders.

In Battleground Australia we discover that the war with Mars was not confined to England and did not end with all Martians destroyed by disease. In Australia some of the aliens survived and went underground, to emerge a century or more later.

 

A Collection of Australia's best-selling literary, crime and speculative fiction writers including: Kerry Greenwood, Jack Dann, Carmel Bird, Jenny Valentish, Janeen Webb, Sean Williams, Kaaron Warren and Angela Meyer with a foreword by film director Alex Proyas (The Crow; I, Robot; Gods of Egypt)

How does a young woman of wealthy parents and high birth become the owner of one of the most famous bordellos in London?

We follow the life of Jade Green; the infamous Madam of The Garden of Eros, from her birth in Shanghai to her imprisonment after one of her girls is murdered by a jealous husband. Upon her release, she takes up residence in the quiet English town of Walton Village and seeks anonymity.

However, fate decrees that she must revisit her past in order to ensure justice for her friend Toby Brown, whose own life is clouded by an ill-fated agreement between cousins made in the desperate days of World War I.

In 2023, Australia reversed its closed border policy and said to the world:

Seven years later, Ord City is a teeming Asian metropolis with 2.5 million people preparing for the First Wave – the first tranche of refugees gaining full citizenship – on Australia Day 2030. But mainstream Australia is passionately divided over Ord City, not least because of the risk of letting in terrorists, and dark political forces are bubbling to the surface.

Agent Conan Tooley is sent up to Ord City to look into a routine gangland murder, but finds himself frustrated and confused by the questions that arise at every step. As the days to the First Wave count down, Conan encounters any number of people throwing up obstacles, including The Army of God (a Christian charity active in Ord City); a carload of young people travelling to Ord City for the Illumination Festival the night before the First Wave; and Asif, a deep cell terrorist with a deadly mission. There is also the Shadow Group – mysterious figures who seem to be pulling strings at high levels to achieve some hidden purpose.

As the various subplots wind towards the explosive conclusion, the motives and values of all are profoundly challenged.

 

Welcome to Ord City is a satirical crime thriller set against the backdrop of Australia's refugee policy and the malleable populism that characterises the Lucky Country in the C21.