eBook Listing

Welcome to a world of things improbable.
Here you'll find the apocalypse isn't as upsetting as expected, and that golems are good at carrying a tune. Look and you'll see divinities beside demons, along with hungry bone fairies, and a bigfoot immortal.
Here a fallen angel is more foul-mouthed than angelic, while a Maori monster isn't quite so monstrous. Come look through the spectral spectacles of a Cantonese boy one strange city night, find a kindness cure for your local rougarou, and solve a very tiny library crime.
Whatever improbable things you seek, open these covers and take a peek. Ghosts and giants and changelings await.

A driver picks up a hitchhiker from the side of a road; a restorer develops an unusual bond with a cursed doll; a visit to the cabin in the woods goes terribly wrong...
We all know how these stories end - or do we?
In This Fresh Hell, every story begins with a well-known horror trope but ends with a twist, bringing new life and unexpected resolutions to old ideas. Fears are interrogated, ghosts re-examined, and monsters reconfigured.
From chilling to quirky, these stories will appeal to dedicated horror fans and those dipping into the genre for the first time.
A Slender Man offers help to a boy in trouble; a haunted house is reluctant to terrify its new residents; a heartbroken influencer is challenged on a luxury cruise from hell.
Writers from Australia and around the world reignite and subvert horror tropes in 19 genre-bending stories:
Eugen Bacon, Elle Beaumont, Katya de Becerra, Jason Franks, Raymond Gates, Narrelle M. Harris, Sarah Glenn Marsh, Greg Herren, Claire Low, Annie McCann, Chuck McKenzie, L.J.M. Owen, Gillian Polack, Tansy Rayner-Roberts, Clare E. Rhoden, Candace Robinson, Sarah Robinson-Hatch, Claire L. Smith, C. Vonzale Lewis, and A.J. Vrana.

An extraordinary story telling of a man raised in New Zealand, Thomas McCallum, the woman he falls in love with while at university, Rose, and the adventure they couldn’t have predicted while journeying Turkey; which has them saving a small 5-year-old boy who is threatened with dire consequences. This is a glass half full story involving strong but differing views on evolution and creation, with opposing philosophies coming together in a practical explanation of divinity.

 

Maggie is Thursday’s Child, a spirited girl growing up in an English country village  surrounded by apple orchards and hop fields. Neighbours are friends and the local landowner, the Squire, is a fair, decent man to his workers. Life could be idyllic, if not for the unwelcome intrusion of air raids.

 

This is 1941 and WW2 is raging. When peacetime is finally declared in 1945, it seems the war is over - but through tragic circumstances Maggie realises that war comes in many guises. Life changes from one of happy frivolity to loneliness and rejection.

 

However, the village, her friends and a deep fascination with a four-penny stamp from a country far away that she has never seen but yearns for all give Maggie the strength to keep moving forward.

 

Ultimately, Maggie learns the most valuable of lessons - to believe in her dreams and in herself.

Nothing is quite what it seems in this tall tale; dubious science meets equally dubious myth making. The myth of the Tiger-wolf (Thylacine alpine) is it, as they say, a fraud? The fantastic adventures of the "Green Avenger" cartoon, drawn by Nat Klein, just one of his inventions of improbable worth. Welcome to the Society of the Wolf, the re-creation of Tasmania's Great Western Tiers within a vast snow-jar constructed in the Victorian Museum. A tale of love and redemption, deep ecology and the dreams we live by. Join Nat and Rosslyn, Eugene, Nadia, Mary and the Green Avenger on this romp through the snow bound world of the Tiers.

Don't be deceived by this tardis of a book, its three small monologues contain multitudes. Through the gently detailed lives of its subjects whole civilisations emerge: the fifteenth-century India of the dying and illiterate poet, Kabir; the Stalinist Russia of Chekhov's younger sister, Maria; and the early seventeenth-century, Inquisition-ravaged Italy of the Calabrian theologian and poet, Tommaso Campanella. The characters, at the end of their lives, are haunted by their pasts, and in prose of simple, meditative, elegiac beauty, Jaireth suggests that this nostalgia is neither a longing for a lost place or a lost time, but is, rather, a homelessness in time - his own included - an uneasiness that has driven all that they have and have not done. The book is ultimately about the mystery of creation itself, the silence from which all things come and to which they inevitably return.

- John Hughes

Subhash Jaireth lives in Canberra. Between 1969 and 1978 he spent nine years in Moscow. He has published three books of poetry: Yashodhara: Six Seasons without You (Wild Peony, 2003), Unfinished Poems for Your Violin (Penguin Australia, 1996) and Before the Bullet Hit Me (Vani Prakashan, 1994, in Hindi).

A novel written true to the histories, and true to the memories of Enric Torres i Barbo, whose life and philosophies this novel takes for its guide.

Twin boys Enric and Josep, at ten years of age, served as spies and couriers in the Resistance by the Republican Spanish against the invasion of Fascist forces in Spain, then from Italy and Germany during the Civil War.

In Catalonia the war begins in Barcelona.

THE MAZE of alleys and passageways of the old city as we passed through were not at all quiet. The closer we came to the Ronda Universitat the more gunfire we could hear. Not only from the direction of the Placa de Catalunya, it bounced from a building behind us, which made us crouch and whirl, and then from laneways where there was no one, as if the sound of war could stalk the town of its own accord.

The twins will go on, for the Resistance, to gather intelligence, to running propaganda leaflets and contraband across the French border, to guiding fugitives over the Pyrenees.

Of this time in his childhood Enric has said, 'It was so cold up there, I tell you, I pee icicles.'

Während eines heftigen Regens verschwindet Jeffrey Anderson spurlos im australischen Busch. Die Suche nach ihm bleibt erfolglos, und schließlich wird Inspektor Napo¬leon Bonaparte eingeschaltet, um den Fall zu klären. Anderson, so findet Bony bald heraus, war ein gewalttätiger Hitzkopf und-unter den Todeszauber.

 

»Mit Arthur Upfield begann der ethnische Kriminalroman.« - Frankfurter Rundschau
»Seine 30 Krimis gehören zum Besten, was die australische Literatur zu bieten hat.« - Reclams Kriminalromanführer
»Arthur Upfield war ein geborener Geschichtenerzähler. Kaum ein anderer Autor hat es wir er verstan¬den, eine scheinbar tote Wüste mit solch buntem Leben zu erfüllen, und keinem ist es wie ihm gelungen, die unerwartete Schönheit der australischen Hügel und Wälder und Felsenküsten mitzuteilen.« - Times

»Holen Sie mir den Vogel runder«, bat der alte Simpson. »Ich möchte seinen Hals zwischen meinen Fingern spüren.«
Ein eprechender Kakadu und ein kauziger alter Mann im Rollstuhl empfangen Inspector Napoleon »Bony« Bonaparte, als er in einem einsam gelegenen Hotel inmitten der Grampian Mountains ankommt. Bony ist auf der Suche nach zwei spurlos verschwundenen Mädchen. Kann ihm das seltsame Paar weiterhelfen?
Tödlicher Kult: der bizarrste Fall in Bonys Karriere - jetzt zum ersten Mal in deutscher Sprache.

Set in 1920s Sydney, the heyday of Theosophy and other 'new religions', Towards a Better World explores a time bursting with new and exciting ideas - but also with rumours concerning clergy and young boys. Based on family stories and careful research, Stephanie Claire tells the story of a group of young Theosophists and their new friend Ed Best, who mix in a heady world featuring luminaries such as activist and orator Annie Besant, 'new world Teacher', Krishnamirty, and the dominating figure of Bishop Charles Leadbeater, resident at The Manor in Mosman, Sydney, where ideals and realities may collide.

 

Stephanie Claire's literary output includes biographies, children's books, radio programs and short stories.

Three short stories of rural romance that will take you on journeys of heartbreak, terror and and a woman's tentative struggles to reclaim her identity.

Playing With Fire

Lisa is forced to revisit a tortured love affair when she recognises her companions on an outback train journey - an ill-fated family from her past.

Bushwhacked

Brittany's quest for adventure on an isolated cattle station goes horribly wrong when she and Scott, the head stockman, are abducted on a lonely county road.

Coming Home

Kirsty leaves a destructive marriage to return to her parent's cattle station, but has to contend with her father's new manager - the boyfriend she deserted years before in favour of the city.

Melbourne Private Investigator, Sandi Kent, has her hopes for an easy December dashed when two complicated cases crash into her lap.

Sandi is hired by her volatile ex-girlfriend to rescue a young South Korean woman from an illegal brothel. And then - in a curiously parallel case - is engaged by a lawyer friend seeking defence angles for a Colombian immigrant charged with murdering a sex worker.

As Sandi juggles the demands of her clients, she becomes embroiled in the city's seamy underworld of human trafficking, drugs and murder.

And soon more lives, including her own, are at risk.  

'This book is hilarious, quirky and completely out of left field,' said somebody.

From debut author Hayden Bradford comes a rip roaring yarn which could be the funniest book published this year.

'Travesty' is an unashamedly hilarious tale of a bloke so hard done by in his life, he could only have been born from the imagination of another bloke. His mother named him Travesty as she believed his birth signalled the beginning of one long, drawn out disaster for her. But without warning, Travesty's life comes to an abrupt and ridiculously funny end. He is then delivered to Heaven. How does that happen to an atheist?

Hitch yourself a ride on Travesty's crazy journey on Earth and in Heaven!

'You know when you are sitting alone laughing out loud you have a classic. Great laugh,' said another someone.

What happens on tour stays on tour was the mantra for the southern hemisphere backpackers who swarmed Europe in the 1980s. Foreign countries had to be explored and devoured in every way possible.

 

Waikato-born Judy Williams worked hard for her big OE: London, Paris, Rome, Gallipoli; and her adventures were dutifully recorded in her diary.

 

A diary that also recorded how the obsessive Tugga Tancred and his Kiwi mates turned Judy's trip of a lifetime into a nightmare of sly sexual harassment. Their bad behaviour went unnoticed, or was ignored by fellow passengers like Australian Andrew Hackett who chose to party hard with Tugga's Mob. After all, they were in Europe for a good time, not a long time.

 

And what a time it was, until Tugga's fixation ultimately led to murder: a crime that went unpunished for 30 years.

 

But few things remain hidden forever. The rediscovery of Judy's hand-written diary sparks a trail of revenge that the original perpetrators never see coming.

 

'With... penetrating insights into the world of newsgathering, Tugga's Mob is the story of a forgotten crime that refuses to stay buried...' - Garry Disher

If you want to be entertained and yet stretched, then Twisted Journeys is the book for you.

 

Albert Trajstman has again shown his mastery of the novella in this new collection of three new works. Diverse and ambitious, the stories take us to faraway places and strange situations. Each novella twists and turns in unexpected directions, changes shape and weaves strands together.

Journeys of a Prodigal Son is a romp set in the sixteenth century, travelling with the story's insensitive protagonist on a journey through Renaissance Italy. He is shipwrecked and meets a Venetian merchant and his family, a duchessa, a Jewish librarian at the University of Bologna and a wise sophisticated Turk. Liberally laced with sexual adventures, the story takes us to exotic settings and unexpected endings.

Journey to Find out What Happened concerns a scam perpetrated against the US army in post-war Paris. The cast includes a world-weary journalist, a shady lawyer, an enigmatic US soldier and a number of bit players. Follow the journalist as he tries to find out what really happened. It's a mystery in the best tradition of Graham Greene's The Third Man.

Finally, My Journey with the Nixons and Others is a bitter-sweet story set in Melbourne from the 1960s to the present, a story of growing up in the company of a bizarre family called the Nixons. Sad and humorous in turns, it is told in an episodic fashion.

 

Enjoy a master storyteller who takes you to unexpected places!