Adapted by Vanessa Bates from Gabrielle Wang's award-winning novel, A Ghost in My Suitcase is an action-packed adventure story that crosses cultural and spiritual worlds.Twelve-year-old Celeste - 'half French, half Chinese and all Australian' - travels to China to scatter her mother's ashes. There she meets her grandmother, Por Por, a quirky and wise woman with an unusual skill. Por Por is a ghost-hunter and her services are much in demand.When Celeste learns she m...

Loneliness, fear, bad dreams, repressed attraction or repugnance, lockdown and sudden escapes, jigsaw puzzles, food deliveries, bad tempers and penguins.These were the things that stole our sleep for a year, or that rescued, haunted and comforted us. In the early days of Covid lockdown in 2020, playwrights Vanessa Bates, Mary Rachel Brown, Suzie Miller, Lachlan Philpott and Katie Pollock came together in a virtual writing group to support each other and spur each other on. There we...

Fairy-tales reworked, funny, furious and fantastic, as tales of the marginalised.Original fairy-tales were about bravado, fortune, destiny and courage. But always, watching from the edges, were the quiet ones. The bit characters. The weary mothers, the ugly sisters, the irrelevant queens, the grandmothers.In The Magic Hour, they get their chance to shine.From beach shacks and caravan parks, in Housing Commission towers and old school discos, in backyard gar...

All Jed’s friends have moved to the city, but he still lives with his two mothers in a small town between the beach and the bush, on a train line with a city at either end. Waiting.He’s not sure what he’s waiting for, but in the meantime he works at the council investigating sinkholes in people’s backyards. Since finishing high school, the frustrations of coastal life are looming large. And something is being hidden from him about the illness facing one of his mothers.This ...

On 23 October 2002, Chechen rebels stormed a theatre in Moscow, holding hundreds of theatregoers hostage. Three days later, in Newcastle, Australia, a young man staged an armed robbery in a bookshop.Checklist for an Armed Robber picks up the threads of these two real life events and weaves them together in an attempt to better examine the complex patterns of violence, courage and empathy. This AWGIE-winning play from Vanessa Bates observes with sensitivity and humour the p...

#1 New York Times bestselling author Scott Turow returns with a page-turning legal thriller about an American prosecutor's investigation of a refugee camp's mystifying disappearance.At the age of fifty, former prosecutor Bill ten Boom has walked out on everything he thought was important to him: his law career, his wife, Kindle County, even his country. Still, when he is tapped by the International Criminal Court—an organization charged with prosecuting cr...

June, 1997. In Australian desert a nuclear bomb explodes. There are no survivors and no clues about who set it off. In England, two police officers are shot dead when they apprehend a cargo vessel in Portsmouth dock. Vast quantities of heroin are later found on board. And in Hong Kong, an explosion rips through one of the colony's famous floating restaurants, killing the entire Board of Directors of EurAsia Enterprises Ltd, a multi-billion dollar shipping corporation.These apparent...

THE ST. PETERSBURG CONFESSIONS is a gripping tale that clocks in at a little over 20,000 words or 110 pages long. It is also the prequel to the character Ghostface in STROGANOV."I have sins to confess.""Tell me, what evil have you done?"It's St. Petersburg, right before the fall of Communism. Father Fedor, an Orthodox priest at St. Catherine's Cathedral, is locking up after the late night mass when he hears a stranger's voice call out to him. The man begs to confess ...

This book provides IELTS General Training candidates with 51 model letters to help them prepare for Task 1 of the writing module. The letters cover a wide variety of topics and illustrate how to write for a host of different situations. The author has a long experience of helping General Training candidates achieve high IELTS scores.

A candid, rollicking literary travelogue from a pioneering New Yorker writer, an intrepid heroine who documented China in the years before World War II.Deemed scandalous at the time of its publication in 1944, Emily Hahn's now classic memoir of her years in China remains remarkable for her insights into a tumultuous period and her frankness about her personal exploits. A proud feminist and fearless traveler, she set out for China in 1935 and stayed through ...

A new breed of spy novel combines classic thrills (The Americans, John Le Carre, and Alan Furst), Bolshoi intrigue, and elements of the paranormal.Marina is born of privilege. Her mother, Sveta, is the Soviet Union's prima ballerina: an international star handpicked by the regime. But Sveta is afflicted with a mysterious second sight and becomes obsessed with exposing a horrific state secret. Then she disappears.Fearing for their lives, Marina and ...

Rock 'n' roll, revolution, and romance are seductively woven together in this intense and moving novel from the author of Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous YouthIn her flat in north London, Iona Kirkpatrick sets to work on a new project translating a collection of letters and diaries by a Chinese musician. With each letter and journal entry, Iona becomes more and more intrigued with the unfolding story of two lovers: Jian, a punk rocker who believes there is ...