21 Great Reads
We showcase some of our fiction from more than 35 years of publishing good books - all at half price for a limited time.
1999. Winter. Bondi. Harry’s been on the streets so long he could easily forget what time is. So Harry keeps an eye on it. Every morning. Then he heads to the beach to chat with the gulls. Or he wanders through the streets in search of food, clothes, Jules. When the girl on the bus sees him, lonely and cold in the bus shelter that he calls home, she thinks about how she can help. She decides to write a symphony for him.
So begins a poignant and gritty tale of homelessness and shelter, of the realities of loneliness and hunger, and of the hopes and dreams of those who often go unnoticed on our streets. This is the story of two outcasts – one a young woman struggling to find her place in an alien world, one an older man seeking refuge and solace from a life in tatters. It is also about the transformative power of care and friendship, and the promise of escape that music holds.
An uplifting and heartbreaking story that demands empathy. Amid the struggles to belong and fit in, we are reminded that small acts of kindness matter. And big dreams are possible.
MARCH 2020 | ISBN 9781925950069 | Paperback | 225 pages | 234 x 153 mm
Simple, rippling, meditative prose details a miracle of kindness.
—Carmel Bird
Aesop’s fables are brought to life by the timely intervention of Sprite from the future, who prods Aesop into debate about the meaning of stories: are they for fun, or do they have the chance to change the world? This book offers a virtuoso display into how the building blocks of fables can enchant, enrage, enlighten and educate us all.
Very little is known about Aesop who was supposed to have been a slave on the island of Samos in the sixth century BCE. It is his fables (and those attributed to him) that have come down to us through the centuries. In these tales, a fabulist from the future, referred to as Sprite, hoicks herself back to his century. “Why didn’t you save the world?” That’s the Sprite’s cry. Aesop, meanwhile, is trying to save his skin, make up his fables and live his life. Given the pitfalls of human nature, are the fables an Instruction Manual for staying out of trouble? What about morals, what about reform, what about the castigation of social evils? Sprite nags and cajoles and begins to wonder how much power a writer really has.
The book offers a virtuoso display of how the building blocks of a fable can be used in a variety of ways. It’s witty, it’s satirical and the Sprite herself is a comical figure. But at the end, when she has to return to her own time, that is to our own time and to our broken world, her central question suddenly seems less absurd, and far more urgent.
Suniti Namjoshi is an inspired fabulist.
—Marina Warner
2018 | ISBN 9781925581515 | Paperback | 130 pages | 198 x 128 mm
Most everything has dried up: water, the womb, even the love among lovers. Hunger is rife, except across the border. One night, a village is bombed after its men attempt to cross the border. Nine-year old Amedea is buried underground and sleeps to survive. Ten years later, she wakes with a locust embedded in her brow. This political fable is a girl’s magical journey through the border. The border has cut the human heart. Can she repair it with the story of a small life? This is the Locust Girl’s dream, her lovesong—
For those walking to the border for dear life
And those guarding the border for dear life
Awards
Winner, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, 2016
Winner, Philippine National Book Award for Best Novel in English
Shortlisted, ACT Book of the Year Award, 2016
2015 | ISBN 9781742199627 | Paperback | 192 pages
Sydney, Milsons Point, 1926. Entire streets are being demolished for the building of the Harbour Bridge. Ellis Gilbey, landlady by day, gardening writer by night, is set to lose everything. Only the faith in the book she’s writing, and hopes for a garden of her own, stave off despair. As the tight-knit community splinters and her familiar world crumbles, Ellis relives her escape to the city at sixteen, landing in the unlikely care of self-styled theosophist Minerva Stranks.
When artist Rennie Howarth knocks on her door seeking refuge from a stifling upper-class life and an abusive husband, Ellis glimpses a chance to fulfil her dreams. The future looms uncertain while the past stays uncannily in pursuit.
This beautiful novel evokes the hardships and the glories of Sydney’s past and tells the little-known story of those made homeless to make way for the famous bridge. Peopled by bohemians and charlatans, earthy folk and fly-by-nighters, The Floating Garden is about shedding secrets, seizing second chances, and finding love amongst the ruins.
2015 | 9781742199368 | Paperback | 256 pages | 146 x 210mm
They call them ‘women of love,’ but the lyrical beauty of the term has a hidden dark side: a workforce of very young girls tasked with feeding their families by offering up their bodies for sale. The girls belong to the Nat which includes some of India’s very poorest. For centuries, the Nat men have sent their daughters, sisters, and wives into sex trafficking. Baby girls are welcome arrivals in these towns of love—everyone knows that one day, they will be the breadwinners. As a Nat, you are untouchable, despised by Indian society. How would anyone dare break free of this legacy of prostitution, when it also would mean being shunned by your entire family?
Tamanna dares. As a nineteen-year-old, she breaks free and runs away. But it costs her dearly—she is forced to leave her five-year-old daughter Rupa behind with Jabbar, in the house with the big gleaming knife. Eight years later, Tamanna knows that time is running out for Rupa. She demands help, both from the police and from the underfunded aid organization Pukaar. And who could look a mother in the face and argue that saving her daughter isn’t worth risking everything?
With insight and brutal honesty, Anne Ch. Ostby paints a vivid picture of some of the world’s most vulnerable women and children. And the “women of love” do exist in India today, in the northern state of Bihar, where the author has travelled extensively and come to know them. Town of Love is a raw and gripping story that is guaranteed to leave you breathless.
With a Preface by Ruchira Gupta, founder of the Indian NGO Apne Aap on which Pukaar is based.
2013 | ISBN 9781742198477 | Paperback | 135 x 208 mm | 278 pages
1920, deep in the New Zealand bush, a settlement of Christian fundamentalists live a life of austerity and isolation. It is a place where there is little space for compassion, particularly for the women who can never rid themselves of Eve’s original sin. The elders rule over the women, children and young men, meting out punishments for transgressions as ordinary as self-reflection.
Sisters Juno and Hannah have grown up in the community, but when a stranger washes up on the river bank and Hannah goes to his aid, she finds herself accused of necromancy. The girls flee but are quickly forced to accept help. Hannah, unsure who is friend or foe, finds herself dependent upon and attracted to the man into whose lips she breathed life.
Juno and Hannah is a remarkable novella. The vivid New Zealand landscape reflects the journey of the sisters with its bounty of beauty and resources but also with its scars, wrought during the early days of colonisation.
2013 | ISBN 9781742198750 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 160 pp
Mrs Angel Rendle-Short said that a book given to her daughter, Francesca, as an English textbook at school would teach her to be a permissive rebel.—Courier Mail, 1975
Bite Your Tongue is a story of great heart. It is the story of a teenage girl’s growing up in Queensland during the 1970s, the daughter of a morals crusader: Angel Rendle-Short / Mother Joy Solider. The tale is thoroughly embedded in Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s conservative Queensland; a time of great social change for the whole of Australia.
The narrator’s family is characterised by the fervour of religious fundamentalism and extremism, which manifested itself in Angel’s highly public, right wing activism. Bite Your Tongue is also the story of the daughter as an adult and a writer, facing her mother’s mortality while at the same time ‘discovering’ her in archival materials.
These threads are woven together in a mix of novel and memoir, each informing and illuminating the other with their different voices, making Bite Your Tongue a highly original work. Using this unusual and fascinating form, Francesca presents a personal social history, documenting a strong, conservative protest movement with a very real list of books to ban and to burn.
While harrowing at times, Bite Your Tongue also displays a superb lightness of touch, and a great joy in the power of language. It is an investigation into the very nature of storytelling, displaying great humour and heart.
In Francesca Rendle-Short’s family, silence was golden. So to break ranks and tell stories about her peculiar family life and her mother’s moral crusading should send this daughter straight to hell in a ball of smoke and flame along with all those books her mother wanted to burn. Some stories are hard to tell. But like reading, writing stories changes everything. Set in 1970s Queensland and also contemporary times, Bite Your Tongue is an elegant mix of novel and memoir that is in turn harrowing and delightful. It threads together the childhood story of the fictional Glory Solider, with the thoughts and experiences of the adult author, Francesca Rendle-Short, as she looks more deeply into her mother’s activism at the time of facing her mother’s death. Can a daughter forgive her mother for making her a pawn in her conservative moral crusades? Can greater understanding reinstate love? What does a mother owe a daughter and a daughter a mother?
2011 | ISBN 9781876756963 | Paperback | 230 x 155 mm | 246 pp
Remember The Tarantella is a remarkable work. It's learned and frivolous, female not feminine, silly and serious. Written in several strands of narrative, the many characters create a space as if reading were a dance party. Story is not the main objective. Private conversations and thoughts are always within earshot of the rhythm of others, like the stamping of feet and the beat of the music. This is concerto-like poetry; many instruments of different tones assist the reader to know who is who.
2011 | ISBN 9781876756932 | Paperback | 204 x 132 mm | 300 pages
An international prize-winning novel by Nigerian-born Sefi Atta, Everything Good Will Come is a powerful and eloquent story of a young woman’s coming of age. It is 1971, and Nigeria is under military rule and eleven-year-old Enitan Taiwo is tired of waiting for school to start. Will her mother, who has become deeply religious since the death of Enitan’s brother, allow her to be friends with the new girl next door, Sheri Bakare? The two girls’ paths traverse this novel, one manipulates the traditional system, the other attempts to defy it.
2008 | ISBN 9781876756666 | Paperback | 202 x 134 mm | 336 pp
A vivid desert odyssey, The Falling Woman travels through a haunting landscape of memory, myth and mental maps. Told in three voices – Stella, Estella and Estelle – this is an inspiring story drawn from childhood memories, imagined worlds and the pressing realities of daily life.
The Falling Woman charts one woman’s journey into the heartland. It is a journey taken across the desert, into the heart of memory, and into the mythic heart, that place to which we return in times of crisis.
2003 | ISBN 9781876756369 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 270 pp
Poppy Sinclair is approaching fifty, and mostly loves her life; teaching young children, living in her Auckland home, intimately connected to family and friends. After a fairytale romance with Kate ends tragically, she reshapes her life to living alone. Still, you can't shut out love, and with the arrival of a surprise visitor, anything can happen. An evocative look like at life and love, Poppy's Progress is a delightful story of a woman coming to terms with loss and discovering that you can be surprised, even by those you are closest to.
2002 | ISBN 9781876756284 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 184 pages
Rose Zwi’s stories embrace people from different countries and cultures drawn together by a common humanity. Her characters range from a political activist who is house-arrested, to the child of immigrant parents caught between two cultures; from a city-educated woman returning to the arid homeland of her tribal grandfather, to a Rabbi and his wife in an East European shtetl; from a solitary dingo in a small Australian town, pursued to its inevitable end to a farmer obsessed with returning his land to its natural state.
Rose Zwi enchants the reader in her struggle to arrive at the truth of a situation. With a delicate but ironic touch, leavened with gentle humour, the award-winning author of Another Year in Africa, Safe Houses and Last Walk in Naryshkin Park opens our eyes to the world around us and captures our hearts.
The title comes from Horace's Satires:
"Furthermore, that I may not run over this matter with a laugh in the manner of those who rattle off jokes – and yet what is to prevent one from telling the truth with laughter, as coaxing teachers sometimes give their pupils cookies to make them willing to learn their ABCs."
2002 | ISBN 9781876756215 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 197 pages
A Spinifex feminist classic, and winner of the Angus and Robertson manuscript prize.
Growing up in a rural working-class home, Maureen Craig rebels against her angry mother, the privileges of her favoured brother and the relentless conformity of 1950s Australia. University promises a new world both terrifying and exhilarating in its challenges. She explores her sexuality and sets out to make a place for herself in the world. Passionate, funny and heartbreaking, this remarkable novel traces a young woman’s turbulent coming of age.
Originally published under the pseudonym Elizabeth Riley. This edition includes an Introduction by Harriet Malinowitz and an Afterword by the author.
2001 | ISBN 9781876756147 | Paperback | 197 x 130 mm | 256 pages
Molly and Finn are passionate friends – and have been for over twenty years. They write to each other about lovers, risotto, mothering, and the many pleasures of the body. They write feisty letters – gossiping outrageously, arguing fiercely, exchanging present intimacies and past secrets. Finn, at Molly’s insistence, tells of her past love affairs in delicious detail. But there is one story that Finn cannot bear to tell. That is, until outside events force this secret from her. There are contradictions and difficulties within this friendship, yet it survives. It billows out – as tough, beautiful and necessary as parachute silk to a pair of skydivers.
2001 | ISBN 9781876756116 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 209 pages
In the nineteenth century Charles Dickens wrote his novels as serials; in the late twentieth century Merrilee Moss conjures up a new kind of serial fiction: of ghosts, of crime, of satire and of lesbian desire.
When the ghostly Fedora interrupts Julie Barnard's morning coffee in Brunswick Street, Julie's life is set to change. An out-of-work PI, Julie is seduced by Fedora's French accent and flamboyant hats, but soon discovers that wearing beautiful hats is a dangerous activity.
2001 | ISBN 9781876756048 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 88 pages
From the author of the acclaimed 'Godmothers' comes a new and startling novel. Beginning in the South Pacific and stretching back to a Mediterranean past, Sandi Hall explores a friendship that could affect the history of the world. When Dory Previn asked, ‘Did Jesus have a sister?’ Sandi Hall discovered that he did.
1999 | ISBN 9781875559756 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 256 pages
Laurene Kelly’s first young adult novel introduces us to fourteen-year-old Julie, who is struggling with a terrible home life, but could never imagine the horror that is about to destroy her family forever. She dreams of a new life, away from her abusive father, but when her mother doesn’t arrive to meet Julie and her brother Toby after school as planned, her hopes are shattered. She is told there was an accident, but something more is wrong.
1999 | ISBN 9781875559787 | Paperback | 198 x 130 mm | 119 pp
I was a child with many aunties. The hotel was teeming with them ... I grew up with the poetry of aunties.
Lin Van Hek writes about the poetry of aunties in a novel that is at once thrilling and filled with the memories of wilful women. When Eadie Wilt disappears during the flood, everyone thinks she has drowned. But Siddy Church's granddaughter has more life to live in a household filled with stories and larger-than-life characters.
Filled with strong and unconventional women, The Ballad of Siddy Church tells of the lasting effect this larrikin mob has on the life of Edie Wilt. At the centre of the mayhem is Siddy Church.
My grandmother was a difficult woman, you could not get around it. She was born on three different occasions in three locations and she said her name was Siddy Church. Late at night she would sit like a giant curious toad, her heavy-lidded eyes turning with her head, her pupils like magic bullets about the room. Her past was too big and too diverse for her to govern, people talked about her shady past. She had relinquished her right to her own story.
1997 | ISBN 9781875559619 | Paperback | 195 x 130 mm | 261 pp
Cowrie travels to Hawaii and as she circles the island in an old pick-up truck we discover the tokens of her heritage. Sensual and sexual language brings the earth to life, and Cowrie too as she tests the limits of her endurance and explores her erotic connection with the earth. Island life erupts through the descriptions and you can taste the tropical fruit, the fish cooked in banana leaves and coconut, and smell the sweet fresh ginger.
1994 | ISBN 9781875559282 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 123 pages
‘You can never be too thin or too rich’ said Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor. But Francesca Miles, independent feminist detective, disagrees. When one of the richest men in Sydney is found dead in his penthouse, she teams up with Inspector Joe Barnaby in a mystery that follows the trials and tribulations of a family that should have everything that money can buy. A thoroughly riveting read.
1992 | ISBN 9781875559022 | Paperback | 200 x 133 mm | 108 pp
Unity Dow
Unity Dow’s third novel, Juggling Truths portrays the childhood of Monei Ntuka in the Botswanan village of Mochudi in Africa. Go to the past with me, so you can take the past to the future, asks her Nkoko. Nei takes us on an extraordinary journey through the many truths that shape her life; the truths of the colonisers and their churches and of her own people. We travel with her through dreams and share the wisdom of her grandmother as she lets the never-ending stories weave their own reality in face of a universe of conflicting truths. Unity Dow recreates with telling insight and gentle humour a world where the truths of the missionaries and the witchdoctors jostle with those of the generations of women.
REISSUE JUNE 2026 | ISBN 9781922964489 | Paperback | 216 x 140 mm | 173 pages