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These stories re-create a strange and fascinating world, where a child may look through squares of lattice enclosing a garden of Indian jasmine and Kasmiri roses to the sheepyards and paddocks of the Australian countryside. They are unique in their depiction of life of an Indian family in rural Australia, but they would be distinguished in any case by their quality - their crystalline images and lyrical feeling, their sensitive perception of light and shade, of human suffering, exile and joy.

 

Mena Abdullah and Ray Mathew have created a beautiful new world in Australia: the gay, touching and agonising life of an immigrant Indian family as seen by their younger daughter. - The Australian

 

Never has the other fellow's point of view been put forward with more gentle suavity than in this tale of Indian children growing up in rural Australia ... The style throughout has a simplicity and purity of language that is a delight to read. - The West Australian

 

...a jewel of a book. - Nancy Keesing

Canberra bomb toll 'horrific' - Amongst those believed killed were the Indonesian Ambassador to Australia, the Indonesian Chief of Army Staff, the Indonesian Minister for Foreign Affairs and...

Tension between Australia and Indonesia, the world's largest Moslem nation, brings the two countries to the brink of war. East Timor's sovereignty and rich oil fields shared by the two neighbouring countries become key elements in one man's ambitions. General Nathan Seda, a powerful Indonesian Officer, has a dangerous plan in which he enmeshes Stephen Coleman, a career Intelligence Officer with the Australian Embassy in Jakarta.

The Timor Man, an absorbing thriller, provides a controversial perspective on events in Indonesia from the abortive coup d'etat of 1965 to the present day.

Ruthless as she is beautiful, when her own team falls down, Giuliett turns to the Australian Ares Outlaw Motor Cycle Gang leader, Robbie L for support and the two outsiders form an alliance.

Book three in the Serpent Series explores the influences of fate and loyalty as it picks apart the impacts of relationships stretched by grief, greed and honour. Underneath, the tale explores the shambolic Italian political landscape as well as the escalating tensions and arrangements between the southern Italian and Nigerian mafia clans. The Trouble with Serpents is set predominantly in Italy, as well as outback NSW, Fiji, Afghanistan, Russia and Poland.

Hiding in plain sight behind the hype of Carnevale in Venice, five mafia families meet to elect a new leader of their combined clans, the Capo di Tutti Capi. Nicholas Delarno has the right to lead, but until recently, everyone thought he was dead.

The Commission members are curious and nervous. In a show of leadership Nicholas claims the coveted role, bringing with him a return to the old ways, values and traditions that have stood the families well for decades. Something most of the clan members are keen to embrace after the chaotic leadership of former boss Don Carlo Seta. And they are willing to sacrifice their misgivings over the new Capo's missing years to satisfy their self-serving needs for secrecy, stability and economic power.

A daring and thrilling journey into a fantastical world of shamans, vampires and werebears where aboriginal Dreaming and Gothic horror are woven together to create a powerful and seamless narrative.

I, the stranger with strange habits which make me avoid the full light of day, enter into the warm circle of your fire and will exchange my yarn for your company...

The stranger, George, tells a story of wonder and horror. Jangamuttuk, his father and Master of the Ghost Dreaming, is a shaman with ceremonies to send the white ghosts back to their own world. But the ghosts keep coming, settling on the land and destroying the local people.

Initiated into the Dreaming, George learns the secret of transforming into his animal companion, Dingo, and discovers the thrill of the hunt. But he is not alone in his lust for blood. Amelia, the white woman, shares his appetite, feeding on humans and animals alike to maintain her terrible power. Moving into the white settlement, she creates a psychic barrier around it to protect herself and her slaves. The aboriginal people must draw on every resource, both physical and psychic, to overcome this threat to their existence.

ABOUT MUDROOROO'S MASTER OF THE GHOST DREAMING:

'A real page-turner. The prose is lyrical, yet simple, the images real and ironic... an exciting, moving and engaging novel.' - SOPHIE MASSON, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

'A most original contribution to Australian literary style... probably the first instinctively Australian magical-realist novel.' - ROD MORAN, WEST AUSTRALIAN

Night falls, and London comes alive.

 

Sherlock Holmes has dedicated his life to uncovering the things that happen in the night, but he has his own secrets hiding in the shadows, too.

 

As Dr John Watson begins to understand the shape of Holmes' secrets, he starts to understand his own, and together Holmes and Watson must navigate the dangers of the nights they spend together - and the ones they don't.

John Wright's moving novel is based entirely on real events and people, countless experiences, reliable testimony and recorded history. The Whispering Surgeon explores the surgical life of Paddy McKenzie and his freakish skills, tireless dedication, courage, wisdom and innovation. The very human story of Paddy McKenzie's own battles will keep the reader spellbound by the depth and selflessness of his involvement in devastated lives and flagging hopes of the damaged and disillusioned.

John Wright calls on his great experience as a cardiothoracic surgeon to tell the wonderful, endearing story of McKenzie, the 'surgical whisperer'.

'... something evil, yes evil, is present amongst us...'

Christopher Marriston, a university lecturer and author, born and raised in Fairfield, now lives in Wakeley with his family. Over on the north shore full time mum, Skyla, raises her two sons. Both Christopher and Skyla are happily married. They have never met nor do they know of the other's existence until one day Skyla buys Marriston's bestseller and lines up to have her copy of the book signed by the author.

Skyla is momentarily overwhelmed by an ominous feeling. Why does she feel a sense of urgency to read Christopher's book? There is something she ought to know. It is a matter of life and death and it involves this author. What nonsense is this? Skyla's world is about to change...

Broome is a little sun-drenched town on the barren north-west coast of Australia, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else's business, where all the little bungalows might be glass for all the secrets they hide. How then had the murderer of Broome's two most attractive widows got away without leaving a single clue? Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte investigates, with his usual calm precision - but the murderer strikes again, and Bony realizes he is dealing with a madman - that time is running out...

 

Bony - a unique figure among top-flight detectives - BBC

It is in a harsh and eerie landscape - the crater formed by the meteor they called "The Stranger" - that another stranger is found... dead. In an area where the presence of every outsider is announced by the bush telegraph, how had this man passed unreported? Who was he? How had he died? No tracks around the crater and no stranger in town. It soon becomes obvious to Bony that both the locals and the Aboriginals are guarding a secret - untill the will of the Tribe breaks their silence...

 

This is undoubtedly Upfield's strongest book, for a number of reasons: 1) Bony is at his best in his detective work; 2) Upfield is at his best in studying the social and cultural situations of the white and the Aboriginals; 3) though the physical setting is less intense than in some other works, it is strong here; 4) Upfield's symbolism - especially in the use of the metaphor of clothes vs nakedness - is extraordinarily complex. There is no doubt that this particular book is a masterpiece in every way. - from The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.

It is in a harsh and eerie landscape - the crater formed by the meteor they called "The Stranger" - that another stranger is found... dead. In an area where the presence of every outsider is announced by the bush telegraph, how had this man passed unreported? Who was he? How had he died? No tracks around the crater and no stranger in town. It soon becomes obvious to Bony that both the locals and the Aboriginals are guarding a secret - untill the will of the Tribe breaks their silence...

 

This is undoubtedly Upfield's strongest book, for a number of reasons: 1) Bony is at his best in his detective work; 2) Upfield is at his best in studying the social and cultural situations of the white and the Aboriginals; 3) though the physical setting is less intense than in some other works, it is strong here; 4) Upfield's symbolism - especially in the use of the metaphor of clothes vs nakedness - is extraordinarily complex. There is no doubt that this particular book is a masterpiece in every way. - from The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.

Southern England. August 1936. An artefact from the dark ages - a wolf carved in jet black - is stolen from the archaeology department of St Matthew's College. A man is murdered in an antique store.

Historian George Haye translates two eighth-century documents for the investigating police, and is very soon nearly murdered himself. What is it about the documents? Aren't they just letters from one Englishman to another? And why does the wolf from St Matthew's seem to be at the black heart of all the evil that unfolds around him?

Haye is desperate. He must find the letters which lead him to the wolf, or he will die.

But Haye will find something else. Something he could never have imagined - something long forgotten, something terrifying...

This anthology harvests the voices of writers from all over the world, in fictional reflection on what the world to come looks like from where they are writing, in place and in time. Editors Patrick West and Om Prakash Dwivedi have selected stories across a range of genres that will surprise, delight, enthrall and even horrify.

Out of print for nearly 70 years, more classic tales from Ion Idriess, who explored Australia, chasing down the stories of a changing continent: "The stories in this volume record happenings or incidents in men's lives which interested me during years of wandering among the bushmen and natives of Cape York Peninsula; the pearlers, trochus and beche-de-mer getters of the Coral Sea; the native islanders of Torres Strait; the "beachcombers" of the Great Barrier Reef; and along the eastern coast and in the Arafura Sea towards the west."

With authenticity that sometimes surprises the reader, Idriess introduces us to Aboriginals from Northern Australia, Papuan head-hunters, and Islanders around the Great Barrier Reef, all still in the colonial phase of European contact. Chinese gold diggers appear too, well before the rise of China. Idriess knew these individuals; he met them, lived with them, before the contemporary world had a chance to make so much difference. The first peoples in the stories are in their tribal state, infused with age-old traditions and behavioral norms, proud but fearful of the white colonialists. It wasn't so long ago - barely three generations. That closeness in time can be said to offer a benefit to the reader; to some extent it helps us understand better their descendants who are alive today and within our society's reach.

- Tony Grey, from his Introduction.

In this WW1 novel, published in English for the first time, Jim and Dick are two lively boys from the bush, along with 20,000 other Australians and New Zealanders, who embarked on what seemed to be a great adventure when they enlisted in the 1st AIF - to fight for 'King and Empire'. Their experience is cut short when both are seriously wounded on the Gallipoli peninsula. They find themselves in beds next to each other on a hospital ship headed for England. As they slowly recover, they discover the 'old country' of their ancestors. Unfortunately, they fall for the same young English nurse and a love triangle emerges to trouble their futures.

French/Australian author Paul Wenz based his novel and short stories on personal experience as an immigrant grazier in central NSW and working for the Red Cross in France and London during World War I. The writing is simple, at times poetic and humorous, instinctively seductive, devoid of convention and banality.

'Wenz is a brilliant noticer - a talent one is born with... and without which no novelist can draw us into the world he is making.' - Helen Garner

Third in the PI series, Thicker than Water finds Kit O'Malley trying not to become too embroiled in the feud between three Melbourne crime families, while dealing with ghosts from her past, and a strange missing persons case.

The women's bar known as Angie's is the last place anyone expected to find the dead body of known-criminal Gerry Anders, and O'Malley soon discovers that helping her family of friends out of trouble can be just as dangerous as facing a deranged killer - only more complicated.

She has to deal with an old nemesis from her days of the force; the matriarch of the notorious Riley clan, who takes a liking to her; a troublemaking journalist; and a Romeo and Juliet scenario.

Kit's ex-partner, Detective Inspector Jon Marek, is not coping with the ugly reality of his on-going hunt for a serial killer; and, as the Feds are still spying on everyone, Kit's courtship of the gorgeous Alex Cazenove remains under wraps.

To cap it all off a good friend and his strange Russian-American client go missing, and suddenly everything points to old grudges and unresolved family tension.

Everything, that is, except the very strange connection to Melbourne's Bubble-Wrap Killer.