You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
From 21 of the best writers in the Asia-Pacific region comes a collection about finding connections where you least expect them. It’s a sweltering night in Kuala Lumpur, and a journalist is protesting in a city on the edge of meltdown. It’s post-9/11 San Francisco, and a woman meets her foster child, who provokes painful reminders of her past. It’s contemporary Bangkok, and a writer’s encounter with ladyboy culture prompts him to explore gender boundaries. And high in Queensland’s Border Ranges, a boy prone to getting lost is having six tiny silver bells pinned to his chest … The Near and The Far is what results when award-winning writers from Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, the P...
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. 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?
Neville Cayley's What Bird is That? is Australia's most popular bird-identification guide. This comprehensive and authoritative field guide, now in its second edition, has been fully revised and updated by prominent ornithologist Terence Lindsey, who has added more than 30 new species and included additional information on identification and breeding. Each bird is illustrated in full colour.
Abandoned at the age of four, Susan Swingler had no contact with her father Leonard or with her stepmother, the revered Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley, until the age of 21. In this startling part memoir, part mystery, Susan explains why she and her father were kept apart while telling the story of her quest to find him. As she painstakingly traces and documents clues to a better understanding of Leonard, she inadvertently unravels an intricate fiction created by Elizabeth Jolley to protect those she loves.
Bite Your Tongue is the story of a teenage girl growing up in Queensland during the 1970s, the daughter of a morals crusader. The tale is thoroughly embedded in Premier Joh Bjelke - Petersen's conservative Queensland. It is also the story of the daughter as an adult and a writer. These threads are woven together in a mix of novel and memoir.
In On Passion celebrated Australian poet Dorothy Porter delves headfirst into the passions, both literary and earthly. We discover the young Dorothy Porter's 'drug of choice' was none other than romantic love and that 'some of the most deeply passionate experiences of [her] life happened between the covers of a book'. Written just before she passed away in 2008, On Passion is a wonderful, ultimately joyous, insight into the creative life of one of our best loved poets.
Michaelis is four when they first move to Australia, leaving behind the cold and the snow and the mud, the flat grey landscape, his father, his mother’s family, and everything he has ever known. He is seven when they pack up again and go home, nine when they return to Australia. When you are used to it, leaving is the easiest thing in the world—and where the sea is warm and the days linger, it is easier to forget. But his stepfather is a bully, and the absence of his real father masks a painful truth. Before long, Michaelis learns that no matter how far you go, your past always follows you, trailing questions in its wake. Beginning with memory’s first fragments, The Last Thread traces ...
In recent years, Australian literature has experienced a revival of interest both domestically and internationally. The increasing prominence of work by writers like Christos Tsiolkas, heightened through television and film adaptation, as well as the award of major international prizes to writers like Richard Flanagan, and the development of new, high-profile prizes like the Stella Prize, have all reinvigorated interest in Australian literature both at home and abroad. This Companion emerges as a part of that reinvigoration, considering anew the history and development of Australian literature and its key themes, as well as tracing the transition of the field through those critical debates. ...