Series: Text Classics

This first volume of Ruth Park’s autobiography is an account of her isolated childhood in the rainforests of New Zealand, her convent education which encouraged her love of words and writing, and the bitter years of the Depression. She then entered the rough-and-tumble world of journalism and began a reluctant correspondence with a young Australian writer. In 1942, Park moved...

Neither the kitchen clock nor the figured squares of the calendar could measure our first golden summers at Mulberry Hill. They were the timeless clockless summers of a dream. Joan Lindsay’s charming and evocative autobiography tells the story of her marriage to Sir Daryl Lindsay, of their life in Melbourne in the 1920s and ’30s, of their travels, and above...

The pain seemed to dissolve. Cold and rough tarmac against the face, chill wind down here at ground level, smell of French perfume on my shirt, delicious. I registered that but all I felt was sad. This is a stupid way to go, I thought. Careless. When Mac Faraday's best friend is found hanging, the assumption is suicide. But Mac...

This is Albion Gidley Singer at the pen, a man with a weakness for a good fact. The first fact is always the hardest: you have to begin somewhere, and such is the nature of this intractable universe that the only thing you can start with is yourself. Dark Places, a companion novel to Lilian's Story, is the tale of...

Listen, I told myself, and heard the waves against the harbour-wall, a gull being peevish, the white tapping stick of a blind man against the stones. Listen, I told myself, this is history. Loosely inspired by the legendary Sydney bohemian Bea Miles, Kate Grenville’s much-loved debut novel recounts the life of the irrepressible Lilian Una Singer: from wealthy middle-class girlhood...

I know what Mr Booker would say on the topic of experience. He would say what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts. Martha could have said no when Mr Booker tried to kiss her. But Martha is sixteen, she lives in a dull town, her father is mad, her home is stifling. Of course she would...

'Ever since his early manhood, since his marriage, he had bought women; most had been bargains and most had made delivery at once. He never paid in advance— "I got no time for futures in women".' New York, on the cusp of World War II. Robert Grant, a middle-aged businessman, lives life by his own rules. His chief hobbies are...

Simon and Flora Beaufort have three perfect children and a comfortable, happy life in London. When Flora takes the children for a month-long vacation in France, Simon stays home to work on his latest film project... what could go wrong? A Pure Clear Light examines a marriage at the moment it goes haplessly off-track: Simon succumbs to the temptation of...

In Helen Hodgman's dazzlingly written debut, a young woman is trapped in a small city on an island at the end of the world—by motherhood and an absent husband, by busybody in-laws and neighbours, by a drab society yet to throw off the shackles of its colonial past. A darkly funny tale of a crack-up in stultifying suburbia, Blue Skies...

It could almost have been their own country: these sections with the gums briefly framed like a traditional oil painting by the slowly passing window. The colours were as brown and parched; that chaff-coloured grass, Ah, this dun-coloured realism. Any minute now the cry of the crow or a cockatoo; but no. Thirteen men and women travel the world on...

In the Memorial Room is a brilliant black comedy by the celebrated author of An Angel at My Table. Harry Gill, a moderately successful writer of historical fiction, has been awarded the annual Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship—a 'living memorial' to the poet Margaret Rose Hurndell. He arrives in the French Riviera town of Menton, where Hurndell once lived and worked, to write....

Charming, intelligent and forthright, the remarkable Madame Midas makes her fortune on the goldfields of Ballarat—and becomes the target of the villainous ex-convict Gaston Vandeloup, a charismatic Frenchman who soon makes himself indispensable to her mining operations. A companion piece to The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, Fergus Hume's second novel is both a tightly plotted murder mystery and an...

'The express flew towards Paris over the flooded March swamps. In a parlour-car, the melancholy dark young woman looked out persistently at the sand-dunes, cement-mills, pines, the war-cemetery with stone banners like folded umbrellas, the fields under water, the bristling ponds with deserted boats and the little naked trees which marked the horizon-searching roads.' It is 1934, and Elvira Western...

'I hate and despise business and anything to do with making money.' 'Do you think it's wrong?' 'It is the enemy of art.' Eighteen-year-old Honor Lawrence is out of place at the bank where she works. When she refuses to accept a promotion, despite her obvious poverty, her mentor, Augustus Debrett, doesn't quite know what to make of it, or...

At the very end of the Ladies' Frocks Departments, past Cocktail Frocks, there was something very special, something quite, quite wonderful; but it wasn't for everybody: that was the point. Because there, at the very end, there was a lovely arch, on which was written in curly letters Model Gowns. Written by a superb novelist of contemporary manners, The Women...

"This is not a romance - I have too often faced the music of life to the tune of hardship to waste time in snivelling and gushing over fancies and dreams; neither is it a novel, but simply a yarn - a real yarn. Oh!" Written with all the high spirits of youth, My Brilliant Career is the unforgettable tale...

'My mother sent you this,' he said. 'Oh?' 'I believe it's some marmalade,' he said. 'From the latest batch.' 'How kind,' said Nicola, opening the bag. 'You haven't told them, then?' 'Told them what?' 'That we're no longer in a shared marmalade situation...' Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this brilliant novel from Madeleine St John, author of The Women in...

"Wills knew that he was fading fastest. On 26 June, he decided the only honourable thing to do was to sacrifice himself to save his companions. 'Without some change,' he wrote, 'I see little chance for any of us'. In 1860, an eccentric Irish police officer named Robert O'Hara Burke led a cavalcade of camels, wagons and men out of...

Kate Grenville's Orange Prize-winning novel The Idea of Perfection is the story of the small town of Karakarook, and of Douglas Cheeseman and Harvey Savage—two people who seem the least likely in the world to fall in love. Unlike Felicity Porcelline, a woman dangerously haunted by the idea of perfection, they come to understand that what looks like weakness can...

So the day promised fair, and the sea lay like a quilt with the waves tucked under, and the trees wavering like leafless water, cut to fit from a transparent block of blue air and frost. Owls Do Cry tells the story of the Withers family - Francie, who is twelve and about to start work at the woollen mills,...

It's 1981 and Evie is sixteen. She has left school but can't find work, and her family has just moved into the run-down inner Sydney suburb of Newtown. Noel lives in the adjoining terrace house. He's fifteen, not taking school seriously and fed up with looking after his ancient bed-ridden grandmother. As a friendship grows between Evie and Noel, the...

They Found a Cave by Nan Chauncy tells the story of four English orphans—Cherry, Nigel, Brick, and Nippy—who migrate to Tasmania. They move to the care of their Aunt Jandie on her farm outside Hobart. Their arrival is greeted with enthusiasm by young farm boy Tas, and weeks of exploration and good times follow. Their adventures come to a halt...

I love you more Than God loves the world. Little published in her lifetime, Lesbia Harford died young in the late 1920s. Her short lyrical poems—about social justice, revolution, free love, feminism, and the experience of women—display a candour and dynamism unusual for her time and place. This essential new selection of her finest work, chosen and introduced by Gerald...

The explorers of Australia tell an epic story of courage and suffering, of dispossession and conquest, of a moving frontier between European invaders and the Aboriginal custodians of the continent. This compelling anthology documents almost four centuries of exploration and takes us into a world of danger, compassion and humour. Many of the stories beggar belief. Maori chief Te Pahi...

A name is the first story that attaches itself to a life. Consider mine: Stanley Alban Marriott Obeysekere. It tells of geography, history, love and uncertainty. I was born on an island suspended midway on the golden trade route between East and West… Ceylon in the 1930s is a crumbling outpost of empire hemmed in by jungle and tea plantations....

Introduced by Gideon Haigh I disapproved of bankers, on principle. Not that I knew any. Until this job, I had worked and made friends with people who shared my views. Mostly moral, mostly kind. An unlikely candidate, then, for the job of executive speechwriter, to be putting words in the mouths of plutocrats deeply suspicious of metaphors and words of...