An unprecedented spate of murders in the 1990s earned Goulburn Jail the ominous name ‘The Killing Fields’. Inmates sentenced or transferred to the 130-year-old towering menace declared they had been given a death sentence. Serial killer Ivan Milat, the ‘Terror Five’ militants who plotted attacks across Sydney in 2005, Brothers 4 Life founder Bassam Hamzy and gang rapist Bilal Skaf are just a few of the inmates inside Australia’s most murderous prison – meet them all here in Phelps’ bestsel...

Two-time Booker-winner Carey (Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang) returns with a magnificent high-stakes art heist wrapped around a fraternal saga. Butcher Boone is an all-id all-the-time Australian painter of enormous talent and renown. Now divorced and bankrupted by his former wife, who tired of his excesses, Butcher has been reduced to caretaking a remote estate for his largest collector. And since the deaths of his working-class parents, he has also been saddled with ...

James Phelps explores all the questions that we can only barely imagine the answers to about Australia’s toughest jails. This is a brutal and honest account of life inside Australia’s toughest jails, and all is not as you would expect. Do women rape each other? Do guards really trade 40-cent phone cards for sex? And do you think the most dangerous inmate in Australia is a man? This is the most comprehensive ever account of women’s prison life yet. You will hear about rapists, drug dealers,...

Award-winning author and journalist James Phelps profiles Australia’s most notorious criminals: these are true accounts of Australia’s hardest inmates, in their own words. From Martin Bryant – perpetrator of our country’s worst massacre at Port Arthur twenty years ago, to alleged hitman and undisputed hardman ‘Goldie,' feared by both prisoners and guards alike, Phelps tracks the rise of ISIS gangs, the lethal underground drug and tobacco trade and the threat of contraband phones. From the ...

Will Power has returned from the Northern Territory shaken, stirred and generally discombobulated. It is late 1942 and demeaningly enough, he finds himself playing a pantomime dame. If only this was his only worry… As his great hero, Shakespeare, once noted, ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.’ Can Will finally overcome his tendency to be the living embodiment of Murphy’s Law?

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Missing Pieces of Sophie McCarthy by B. M. Carroll, read by Kirsty Gillmore, Jane Drinkwater, Natasha Jacobs, Stan Pretty, Olivia Beardsley, Adam Fitzgerald and Katrina Bowker.She's the victim.But is she so innocent?Sophie McCarthy is known for her determination, ambition and brilliance at work. She's tough, but only because she wants to get the best out of peopl...

In Melbourne in the 1950s, an arrogant young Australian poet named Christopher Chubb decides to teach his country a lesson about pretension and authenticity. Choosing as his target the trendiest of the literary magazines, he submits for publication the entire works of one Bob McCorkle, a working class poet of raw power and sexual frankness, conveniently dead at twenty-four and entirely the product of Chubb's imagination.Not only does the magazine fall for the hoax, but the local au...

With scars on his back and silver in his pocket, the huge figure of Jack Maggs strides across the rich landscape of 19th century London. As this enigmatic man moves through its streets and houses, his single-minded quest to find his son will engender love, deceit, and vengeance in the lives around him. Risking execution if he is discovered, ex-convict Jack Maggs has returned to England from Australia. Pretending to be a servant, he is hired by a wealthy London household, where he quickly i...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Paper Ghosts by Julia Heaberlin, read by Antonia Campbell-Hughes.Carl Louis Feldman is an old man who was once a celebrated photographer.That was before he was tried for the murder of a young woman and acquitted.Before his admission to a care home for dementia**.**Now his daughter has come to see him...

Gripping, tense, twisty and full of emotional insight, COME AND FIND ME is Sarah Hilary's Marnie Rome 5 book, for fans of Mick Herron or Clare Mackintosh.'Hilary belts out a corker of a story, all wrapped up in her vivid, effortless prose. If you're not reading this series of London-set police procedurals then you need to start right away' ObserverOn the surface, Lara Chorley and Ruth Hull have nothing in common, other than their i...

In 1994, Anchee Min made her literary debut with a memoir of growing up in China during the violent trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Red Azalea became an international bestseller and propelled her career as a successful, critically acclaimed author. Twenty years later, Min returns to the story of her own life to give us the next chapter, an immigrant story that takes her from the shocking deprivations of her homeland to the sudden bounty of the promised land of America, without language,...

A train stops at a railway station. A young woman jumps off. She has wild hair, sloppy clothes, and a distracted air. She looks Indian, yet she is somehow not. The sudden violence of what happens next leaves the other passengers gasping.The train terminates at Jarmuli, a temple town by the sea. Here, among pilgrims, priests, and ashrams, three old women disembark only to encounter the girl once again. What is someone like her doing in this remote corner, which attracts only worship...