'I don't think I've seen a more impressive collection of Australian writers in a single book.' Stephen Romei, The AustralianOne of the central moral issues of our time is the question of asylum seekers, arguably the most controversial subject in Australia today. In this landmark anthology, twenty-seven of Australia's finest writers have focused their intelligence and creativity on the theme of the dispossessed, bringing a whole new perspective of depth and ...

'I don't think I've seen a more impressive collection of Australian writers in a single book.' Stephen Romei, The AustralianOne of the central moral issues of our time is the question of asylum seekers, arguably the most controversial subject in Australia today. In this landmark anthology, twenty-seven of Australia's finest writers have focused their intelligence and creativity on the theme of the dispossessed, bringing a whole new perspective of depth and...

As Father Stenner, Whitton's President, put it, 'a garish killing in a place for aspirants to the priesthood is, by the world's standards, an exotic crime.' Father Stenner's forebodings were, if anything, well short of the mark. The killer was apparently a madman whose first murder was to be merely the beginning of a bloody series. And into the maelstrom of violence and fear that he created came another and possibly even more sinister element, personified by a beautiful young woman named A...

Artem Samsurov, a charismatic protégé of Lenin and an ardent socialist, reaches sanctuary in Australia after escaping his Siberian labour camp and making a long, perilous journey via Japan. But Brisbane in 1911 turns out not to be quite the workers' paradise he was expecting, or the bickering local Russian émigrés a model of brotherhood. As Artem helps organise a strike and gets dangerously entangled in the death of another exile, he discovers that corruption, repression and injustice are ...

Trapped behind barbed wire in an alien land, a man used to guarding his secrets is compelled to set the record straight... Imagine a faraway country that was once a friend of the West becoming the enemy, its people isolated and savagely repressed by a tyrant known as Great Uncle. As one of the country's most celebrated writers and a war hero, the storyteller has a better life than most - until he is made an offer he can't refuse. He must write a great novel, telling of the suffering of his...

Naomi and Sally Durance are daughters of a dairy farmer from the Macleay Valley. Bound together in complicity by what they consider a crime, when the Great War begins in 1914 they hope to submerge their guilt by leaving for Europe to nurse the tides of young wounded. They head for the Dardanelles on the hospital ship Archimedes. Their education in medicine, valour and human degradation continues on the Greek island of Lemnos, then on the Western Front. Here, new outrages – gas, shell-shock...

This is the story of three terrible famines. The first is an Gorta Mór, the great hunger of Ireland, which began in 1846. The second is the deadly famine that struck Bengal in 1943. The third is the Ethiopian famine, which first sprung up in lethal form in the 1970s under Emperor Haile Selassie and then reappeared under the brutal dictator Mengistu in the 1980s. Keneally visited Eritrea in 1984 to see the effects of this grave event. Tom Keneally shares these three shocking histories with ...

In the Port Macquarie penal settlement for second offenders, at the edge of the known world, gentleman convict Hugh Monsarrat hungers for freedom. Originally transported for forging documents passing himself off as a lawyer, he is now the trusted clerk of the settlement's commandant. His position has certain advantages, such as being able to spend time in the Government House kitchen, being supplied with outstanding cups of tea by housekeeper Hannah Mulrooney, who, despite being illiterate...

Sydney, 1942 – the year of the fall of Singapore, the bombing of Darwin and the surprise attack on Sydney Harbour by Japanese midget submarines. Australia is surely doomed to fall to the Japanese ... Through the eyes of a naive young priest we see into the hearts of a people who fear the end of life as they know it. In the confessional, Father Frank Darragh hears how his community is changing – how the very real fear of invasion by the Japanese is leading people to challenge what the churc...

Alec Ramsey is the survivor of a disastrous Antarctic expedition which abandoned his revered friend and leader of the party, Stephen Leeming. For forty years, in the security of academia, Ramsey has nurtured with guilt his doubts about this incident. Now Leeming's body is, against all odds, to be exhumed from the Antarctic icecap, and Ramsey must confront his obsession and decide whether he really did - or can continue to - survive at all.

Jacko Emptor, Northern Territory born, brings Australian wildness to the television screens of America. Is America ready for him? Is he ready for America? Jacko, investigative reporter, exploits American innocence to break into living rooms and penetrate the heart's secrets. But these secrets make their claim on him too, especially the secrets of Sunny Sondquist, a child-woman missing in the American heartland. Follow Jacko as he exposes evil, falls from grace and shows how television make...

Next door to us, crowded on the east and west by large houses, was the Mantles' narrow little brick place. It seemed to be subsiding crookedly into the earth like an ill-laid tombstone, and was a sunless warren, dim humidity in summer, dim moisture in winter. The laneway to its back door ran flush against our side wall, and beneath the Mantles' lounge-room window, a furze of moss grew a quarter of inch thick on the mortar.