eBook Listing

This entertaining collection includes a romp of a novella called The Rattler, as well as short stories and micro fictions all set in and around contemporary Melbourne. Sometimes serious, sometimes seriously playful - always written in breathtakingly beautiful prose - these stories uncover the heartbreaking tragedies, slow-burning emotions and serendipity of ordinary lives.

* Cover endorsement from acclaimed Australian authors, Paddy O'Reilly and Ryan O'Neill and award-winning UK author, Vanessa Gebbie.

* The Rattler & other stories are written with the wonder and the wit of Peter Carey and Jonathan Franzen.

* A S Patric is an exciting new Australian talent.

* Cover and evocative sketches by talented artist, Miles Allinson.

Aussie child star, Billy Parsons, on contract with Universal Studios, goes missing in 1965 in Hollywood. Last seen walking alone down North Beaumont, the child vanishes without trace. One witness, Mrs Marjorie Femmer, claims to have spoken to Billy on the fateful day, but no one else saw the child. No further investigation is done by the police and the case is conveniently filed away.

Fifty years later, the case is reopened by the Los Angeles Police Department at the request of the Australian Federal Police and Billy Parsons' family. Why is the ageing Mrs Femmer so reluctant to speak again about the events of that day she saw Billy? Is she hiding some dark secret? Detective Chief Inspector Marty Hislop, along with his trusty assistant, Detective Sergeant Miguel La Paz, commence unravelling a long chain of dark circumstances, and a haunting past of deceit and manipulation is soon unmasked.

In times past there was an Aboriginal man called Cumbo Gunnerah. His people called him The Red Kangaroo. He was a clever chief and a mighty fighter (this man from Gunnedah). Later, the white people of this place called him The Red Chief.

It would be hard to find a more satisfying hero than the young warrior Red Kangaroo, who by his mental and physical prowess became a chief of his tribe - the revered and powerful Red Chief of the Gunnedah district in northern New South Wales. His story is a first-rate tale of adventure but it is something more - a true story handed down from generation to generation by its hero's tribe and given by the last survivor, King Bungaree, to the white settlers of the district.

Why had Luke Marks driven specially out to Windee? Had he been murdered or had he, as the local police believed, wandered away from his car and been overwhelmed in a dust-storm? When Bony noticed something odd in the background of a police photograph, he begins to piece together the secrets of the sands of Windee. Here is the original background to the infamous Snowy Rowles murder trial.

 

Napoleon Bonaparte my best detective. - Daily Mail

Joan Lindsay's classic novel Picnic at Hanging Rock is a subtle blend of mysterious and sinister events set in a period of Australian social life drawn with loving nostalgia. The final chapter of the novel was removed at the request of her publishers, creating a mystery to which thousands have begged to know the solution.

The missing chapter reveals what did happen to the schoolgirls who vanished from the Rock after a St Valentine's Day picnic in 1900, and holds commentaries by John Taylor, Yvonne Rousseau and Mudrooroo.

Joan Lindsay's classic novel Picnic at Hanging Rock is a subtle blend of mysterious and sinister events set in a period of Australian social life drawn with loving nostalgia. The final chapter of the novel was removed at the request of her publishers, creating a mystery to which thousands have begged to know the solution.

The missing chapter reveals what did happen to the schoolgirls who vanished from the Rock after a St Valentine's Day picnic in 1900, and holds commentaries by John Taylor, Yvonne Rousseau and Mudrooroo.

On a cloudless afternoon, a man dives into a crowded swimming pool and disappears. Is it murder, a staged disappearance or alien abduction?

The Shallow End - a steady freestyle commentary on sex, celebrity and suntanning.

The Shallow End was shortlisted in the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

On a cloudless afternoon, a man dives into a crowded swimming pool and disappears. Is it murder, a staged disappearance or alien abduction?

The Shallow End - a steady freestyle commentary on sex, celebrity and suntanning.

The Shallow End was shortlisted in the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Genocide in the African country of Sontaria causes a surge of escaping refugees to seek sanctuary in neighbouring Namola.

In Namola, The Fund uses all its resources to build a state-of-the-art facility and to move the refugees from their disease ridden camp on the border.

However, President for Life Joseph Lattua has other plans for the new encampment and evicts the refugees, moving his brother's army into the quarters.

Justine Small and her fellow board members must regain control of their camp or many more refugees will die. They recruit exiled Namolan surgeon Daniel Zibu and convince him to return to the country of his birth in order to defeat Lattua's army and oust the tyrant.

Without an army, can The Fund and Zibu succeed in their wild scheme, and who will be made to pay the ultimate price? Who will the moon goddess Mawu smile upon?

In the first novella of J.O. Phael's Caradoc Henshall supernatural mysteries, former detective Brodie Henshall's Scotland getaway turns into a literal disaster when an earthquake hits the Isle of Skye – crumbling the famous Old Man of Storr right on top of a stranger.

 

Who turns out to have been dead before the massive rock fell.

 

Brodie teams up with local detective Mathias Caradoc, and together they investigate an ever-growing series of supernatural happenings, and start to fall for each other.

 

Beset by new visions, old witchcraft, and strange phenomena, Henshall and Caradoc must solve a mystery, watch each other's backs, and, ultimately, face the Stag God

A portrait-painter discovers a terrifying side-effect of his talent. A professor of medicine finds himself romantically involved with a dying patient. The lives of two young people are changed forever by a performance of the Mozart Requiem. A self-styled Messiah tries desperately to persuade a writer that he alone can avert a catastrophe about to engulf the city.

 

Serge Liberman's extraordinary characters rise up off the page like apparitions. Whether in chastened submission to their fates, or in blazing defiance, or in search of meaning and significance, these figures are denizens of real, intimately observed social worlds. Liberman's sinewy, intensely evocative and poignant style, unique in Australian letters, takes us deep into particular lives but always with reference to universal issues of fate, free will, and the moral landscapes of good and evil. His post-Holocaust humanism is passionately committed to the power of storytelling, and enters with special power art's plea for love, compassion, inner freedom, and redemption.

 

This collection of some of Liberman's finest and most characteristic stories draws upon all six of his published volumes of short fiction. It is offered not only as a summation and a tribute, but as a valuable contribution to the diverse field of Australian multicultural writing.

It is 1977 and Kate is a seventeen-year-old HSC student from Sydney's North Shore. She has dreams of becoming the next Ita Buttrose and being the editor of Cleo. Yet the 1970's free love and peace vibe has not yet hit Kate's suburban home in Beecroft. Kate's carefree behaviour leads her parents to seek the advice of Doctor Jack Grafton, a maverick psychiatrist. Kate is subsequently subjected to Slumber Therapy where she is given a cocktail of drugs that leave her confused about what is real. The second part of the novel witnesses the decline of Grafton who claimed he could cure all mental illness, after multiple deaths of his patients. After Jack's suicide, a bereaved fellow psychiatrist attempts to tell the story of his sharp-minded gregarious friend and defends his increasingly irrational behaviour in the lead-up to his death.

 

Like Puberty Blues for the mirror side of the harbour. - Keri Glastonbury

A confronting puzzle that startles with its sharp, vivid enactment of a tragedy of human innocence caught in the grip of a kind of blithe corruption. - Carmel Bird, author of The White Garden

 

All Souls' Day - the Day of the Dead, 1941. Florence, city of strife. It is Hitler's state visit to Florence and the last of the good times for Mussolini. From now on, he and his lover Clara will cling more closely together, ever more dependent upon each other as their country spirals into civil war and their lives disintegrate.

Annabelle and Enrico, young cousins from an ancient Florentine family, work first with the clandestine resistance, then openly with the partisans. Facing life and death together in the mountains, they forge a passionate life-long bond.

How reliable is memory and can we ever expiate past sins? Are some ghosts better left alone?

'The Sweet Hills of Florence is a sweeping novel spanning time and distance between Italy and Australia, between Mussolini's Italy and that of Berlusconi, between past and present. It is a rich tapestry woven with skilful insight, of the culture and the times. In digging beneath the patina of memory in a search for meaning, it opens doors to the past and raises uncomfortable questions for the present.' - Sandy McCutcheon, author of Black Widow

'I loved how this story brought the contrast of Australia and Italy to life. This is a book that digs deep, as Jan Wallace Dickinson explores the bonds that define us and shape our lives.' - Lisa Clifford, author of The Promise

Its theme is simple: a tale of Miss Susan Brady, a woman with ideas above her station, who is spurned, and whose jealousy corrodes her life and drives her to try and sabotage the happiness of John Iredale, the prosperous South Australian grazier who has broken her heart... Classy stuff, this - the fruit of delighted observation, of a sensuous and irrepressible joie de vivre. You cannot fake this quality, it is remarkable... there lingers in one's mind the rare and special pleasure of the sense-texture which Wenz has created a poignant gift from a Frenchman to Australia, his adopted country. - Helen Garner, from her Foreword.

Paul Wenz (1869-1939) arrived in Australia in 1892 and worked as a grazier in the Forbes district at 'Nanima' from 1898, where he wrote several popular novels and many short stories of Australian bush life that were published in Paris. Close friends with Miles Franklin, Andre Gide and Jack London, this first English translation of a classic French novel was translated by Maurice Blackman.

Three Tari Sisters estranged from the Society they are destined to save.

Elena, more beautiful than any man can resist, is kidnapped, her destiny controlled by the men who desire her.

Yani, warrior woman, brave, strong, able to pass as a man, who will do anything to find Elena.

Marigoth, powerful female mage, determined to never grow up, equally determined to find her missing sister.

In a country oppressed and cruelly ruled, the fate of many people lies in the unsuspecting hands of these three women.