Over the centuries, philosophers, artists, writers and musicians have conveyed the therapeutic value and beauty of the world around us. In his beautiful 'On the Grasshopper and Cricket', John Keats claims, 'The poetry of earth is never dead.' The harsh beauty of our desert landscape is captured by Douglas Stewart. In 'The Fierce Land', he says, 'Here the world ends in a shield of purple stone / Naked in its long war against the sun.' Wordsworth, though a lover of nature, also appreciated t...

In the frantic days of the Victorian gold rushes, few made their fortunes. Most did not. Storm Over Bakery Hill concerns some of those people. A widow, endeavouring to create a life after the death of her ex-convict husband. Her son, determined to reject his father's legacy. A policeman seeking revenge. A bullock driver. And those miners, the battlers, who, bullied and frustrated by authorities, were to take up arms and create one of the iconic moments in our history, the Eureka R...

Bill Cotter’s poems and stories have appeared in literary journals and magazines throughout Australia. He has won a number of literary awards, including the International Library of Poetry competition, the Maryborough Golden Wattle Festival poetry competition and the Melbourne Shakespeare Society’s sonnet competition. His work has also been recorded, published and read over the ABC. Some of his poetry, depicting issues of conservation, has also been on display in the Sale Regional Gallery ...

A beautiful new edition of the complete poems of A. B. 'Banjo' PatersonWhen a young man submitted a set of verses to the BULLEtIN in 1889 under the pseudonym 'the Banjo', it was the beginning of an enduring tradition. today Banjo Paterson is still one of Australia's best-loved poets.this complete collection of his verse shows the bush balladeer at his very best with favourites such as 'A Bush Christening', 'the Man from Ironbark', 'Clancy of the Overflow' and the immortal 'the Man f...

The stories of The Lost Salt Gift of Blood are remarkably simple – a family is drawn together by shared and separate losses, a child’s reality conflicts with his parents’ memories, a young man struggles to come to terms with the loss of his father.Yet each piece of writing in this critically acclaimed collection is infused with a powerful life of its own, a precision of language and a scrupulous fidelity to the reality of time and place, of sea and Maritime farm.Fo...

The poems in Sylvia Plath's Ariel, including many of her best-known such as 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy', 'Edge' and 'Paralytic', were all written between the publication in 1960 of Plath's first book, The Colossus, and her death in 1963.'If the poems are despairing, vengeful and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open to things, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hardminded . . . They are works of great artistic purity and, despite all the nihilism, grea...

Liam never knew who his father was. The town of Derry had always assumed that he was the bastard of a protestant — his mother never spoke of him, and Liam assumed he was dead. But when the war between the fallen and the fey began to heat up, Liam and his family are pulled into a conflict that they didn’t know existed. A centuries old conflict between supernatural forces seems to mirror the political divisions in 1970’s era Ireland, and Liam is thrown headlong into both conflicts! Only the ...

"[This] is a book of great richness, beauty and power and thus very difficult to do justice to in a brief review. . . . The violence is sometimes unbearable, the language rarely less than superb. Dillard's description of the moth's death makes Virginia Woolf's go dim and Edwardian. . . . Nature seen so clear and hard that the eyes tear. . . . A rare and precious book." — Frederick Buechner, New York Times Book ReviewA profound book about the natura...

Coward, scoundrel, lover and cheat, but there is no better man to go into the jungle with. Join Flashman in his adventures as he survives fearful ordeals and outlandish perils across the four corners of the world.When our hero Flashman accepts an invitation from his old enemy, Tom Brown of Rugby, to join in a friendly cricket match, he does not suspect that he is letting himself in for the most desperate game of his scandalous career.What follows is a deadly struggle that s...

This volume replaced Ted Hughes's Selected Poems 1957-1981. It contains a larger selection from the same period, to which are added poems from more recent books, uncollected poems from each decade of Ted Hughes's writing life, and some new work. Another notable feature is the inclusion of poems from his books for younger readers, What is the Truth? and Season Songs.

An international bestseller and winner of the 1981 Georgette Heyer Historical Novel Prize, Zemindar is a magnificent, twisting love story, all unfolding against the tempestuous backdrop of the Indian Rebellion.Englishwoman Laura Hewitt accompanies her newly engaged cousin to India, first to Calcutta and then to the fabled fiefdom of Oliver Erskine, Zemindar – or hereditary ruler – of a private kingdom with its own army. But India is on the verge of the Mut...

The renegades had hit three Army posts. All they took were guns and ammunition: until the last raid. That time they got away with a Gatling gun. Now, somewhere out there, was a gang with enough firepower to take on the United States Army. Find them, the Justice Department told Angel. And stop them.What they didn't know was that out of the empty, lawless land, every trigger-happy gunslick in the territory had been given the word: when you see him coming, trap Angel. And kill him.