The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

$32.99 AUD

Category: Aust Fiction

In 1901, the word 'Bondmaid' was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it. Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the 'Scriptorium', a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word 'bondmaid' flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world. Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women's experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words. Set when the women's suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It's a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.   ...Show more

The Animals In That Country by Laura Jean McKay

$29.99 AUD

Category: Aust Fiction

Out on the road, no one speaks, everything talks. Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She's never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guid e in an outback wildlife park. And although Jean talks to all her charges, she has a particular soft spot for a young dingo called Sue. As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu- its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals - first mammals, then birds and insects, too. As the flu progresses, the unstoppable voices become overwhelming, and many people begin to lose their minds, including Jean's infected son, Lee. When he takes off with Kimberly, heading south, Jean feels the pull to follow her kin. Setting off on their trail, with Sue the dingo riding shotgun, they find themselves in a stark, strange world in which the animal apocalypse has only further isolated people from other species. Bold, exhilarating, and wholly original, The Animals In That Country asks what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying.   ...Show more

The Things She Owned by Katherine Tamiko Arguile

$29.99 AUD

Category: Aust Fiction

Years after the death of her cruel and complicated mother, Erika is still surrounded by the things she left behind: an onigiri basket, a Wedgwood tea set, a knotted ring from Okinawa. Against her Japanese family’s wishes, Erika has also kept the urn containing her mother’s ashes and bones, r efusing to put Michiko’s memory to rest. She ignores her grief, throwing herself into her work as a chef at a high-end London restaurant. But when a cousin announces that she will be visiting from Japan, Erika’s resolve begins to crack. Slowly the things Michiko owned reveal stories of her youth amid the upheaval of Tokyo during and after the Second World War. As the two women’s stories progress and entwine, Erika is drawn to Okinawa, the island of her ancestors. It’s a place of magic and mysticism where the secrets of Erika’s own past are waiting to be revealed. Beautiful and mysterious, The Things She Owned explores the complexity of lives lived between cultures, the weight of crossgenerational trauma, and a mother and daughter on a tortuous path to forgiveness. ...Show more

Application of Pressure by Rachael Mead

$29.99 AUD

Category: Aust Fiction

Heart of the Grass Tree by Molly Murn

$32.99 AUD

Category: Aust Fiction | Reading Level: 1 Fiction

Pearl remembers Nell's feet stretched towards the campfires on the beach, her fourth toe curled in and nestled against the middle toe like a small prawn. They all have a curled fourth toe - Diana, Lucy, Pearl. When Pearl's grandmother Nell dies unexpectedly, Pearl and her family - mother Diana, sister L ucy - return to Kangaroo Island to mourn and farewell her. Each of them knew Nell intimately but differently, and each woman must reckon with Nell's passing in her own way. But Nell had secrets, too, and as Pearl, Diana and Lucy interrogate their feelings about the island, Pearl starts to pull together the scraps Nell left behind - her stories, poems, paintings - and unearths a connection to the island's early history, of the early European sealers and their first contact with the Ngarrindjeri people. As the three women are in grief pulled apart from each other, Pearl's deepening connection to their history, the island's history, grounds her, and will ultimately bring the women back to each other. Heart of the Grass Tree is an exquisite, searing and hope-filled debut about mothers and daughters and family stories, about country and its living history. ...Show more

Racing Time - Ellen Williams Runs for the Outback to Escape Her Disintegrating Life by Suzie Hindmarsh-Knights

$25.00 AUD

Category: Aust Fiction

Ellen Williams needs to disappear. Her bright career as an international jockey is washed away as she's implicated in a horse doping scam-one of the worst crimes in the racing world. Humiliated, alone, and on the run, she answers a job advertisement in a place that's far from her working life. The job, however, is everything that Ellen isn't-cook and housekeeper on one of the largest Cattle Stations in Australia.Alexander McKenzie is a desperate man. His top hand will quit if he doesn't find a suitable housekeeper and cook. However, Alexander knows he's made a mistake hiring Ellen-she's going to be like the last four young women he fired-suffering through the trials of the Outback to hunt a wealthy husband and the last thing Alexander needs is a wife.Ellen knows from experience that men are nothing but liars, and trouble-they destroy careers-and hearts. She'll not let the likes of Alexander McKenzie beat her, after all how hard can managing a house and kitchen be?Amid the lies and secrets that come with cattle rustlers and racehorses, Ellen must find her place in a new world. But when Ellen's past catches up with her, Alexander's intervention will either bring their lives together or explode them apart! ...Show more

A Treacherous Country (Winner 2020 Australian Vogel's Literary Award) by Katherine Kruimink

$29.99 AUD

Category: Aust Fiction

WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN/VOGEL'S LITERARY AWARD There is a woman, somewhere, here, in Van Diemen's Land, unless she had died or otherwise departed, called Maryanne Maginn. Gabriel Fox, the young son of an old English house, arrives in a land both ancient and new. Drawn by the promise of his heart's de sire, and compelled to distance himself from pain at home, Gabriel begins his quest into Van Diemen's Land. His guide, a Cannibal who is not all he seems, leads him north where Gabriel might free himself of his distracting burden and seek the woman he must find. As Gabriel traverses this wild country, he uncovers new truths buried within his own memory. Authentic, original and playful, A Treacherous Country is a novel of loyalty, wisdom and the freedom to act. 'Warm and lively...a witty, Tasmanian Moby Dick' - Tegan Bennett Dylight, acclaimed author of Six Bedrooms ...Show more

A New Name for the Colour Blue by Annette Marner

$24.95 AUD

Category: Aust Fiction

I still see her sometimes in my sleep. She is walking through the blue and orange lights of the city or in the desert country of red ground, spinifex and oaks. Last night I dreamed she was climbing a green and blue mountain, the kind you see in the tropics, rich and heavy with steam and rain. She is sti ll only a girl in my dreams, but that's how I remember her. In every dream she is walking. In every dream I call out her name. Tania. Ten years after the disappearance of her best friend and the death of her mother, Cassandra Noble escapes her country childhood to pursue life as an artist in the city. On the threshold of a promising career as a painter, her creativity suddenly abandons her. Soon after, she finds herself with a lover who wishes to control her just as her father once did. While her last painting just might hold the key to why she can no longer create, what will happen when she discovers the two tragic events of her childhood are linked in ways she could never have imagined? A New Name for the Colour Blue is a story of the healing power of remembering, of love, and the breathtaking beauty of the natural world. ...Show more

The Loudness of Unsaid Things by Hilde Hinton

$29.99 AUD

Category: Aust Fiction

 If you loved BOY SWALLOWS UNIVERSE and LOST AND FOUND, you will love this debut novel. A stunning story about family, loneliness and isolation that will make you laugh, cry and be a bit kinder to those who are lost. 'My heart grew, then broke, then mended itself. A wise, funny,  ;brave novel and a story that you will never want to forget.' Favel Parrett An unforgettable story of loneliness, isolation and finding your way. Heart-wrenching, wise and wryly funny, this novel will make you kinder to those who are lost.Miss Kaye works at The Institute. A place for the damaged, the outliers, the not-quite rights. Everyone has different strategies to deal with the residents. Some bark orders. Some negotiate tirelessly. Miss Kaye found that simply being herself was mostly the right thing to do.Susie was seven when she realised she'd had her fill of character building. She'd lie between her Holly Hobbie sheets thinking how slowly birthdays come around, but how quickly change happened. One minute her Dad was saying that the family needed to move back to the city and then, SHAZAM, they were there. Her mum didn't move to the new house with them. And Susie hated going to see her mum at the mind hospital. She never knew who her mum would be. Or who would be there. As the years passed, there were so many things Susie wanted to say but never could. Miss Kaye will teach Susie that the loudness of unsaid things can be music - and together they will learn that living can be more than surviving.   ...Show more

The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld

$32.99 AUD

Category: Aust Fiction

The lives of three women weave together across four centuries in the dazzling new book from Evie Wyld, a Granta Best of Young British Novelist Surging out of the sea, the Bass Rock has for centuries borne witness to the lives that pass under its shadow on the Scottish mainland. And across the centuries, the fates of three women are inextricably linked to this place and to each other. Sarah, accused of being a witch, is fleeing for her life. Ruth, in the aftermath of the Second World War, is navigating a new marriage and the strange waters of the local community. Six decades later, Viv, still mourning the death of her father, is cataloguing Ruth's belongings in the now-empty house. As each woman's story unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that their choices are circumscribed, in ways big and small, by the men who seek to control them. But in sisterhood there is also the possibility of survival and a new way of life. Intricately crafted and compulsively readable, The Bass Rock burns bright with anger and heart - a devastating indictment of the violence that men have inflicted on women throughout the ages. ...Show more

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood

$29.99 AUD

Category: Aust Fiction | Reading Level: 1 Fiction

RICHARD GLOVER REVIEWS: ''I love writers who break their own mould with each book. Charlotte’s last book, The Natural Way of Things, was darkly compelling; this has more sunshine plus wonderfully flawed characters in whom you may find reflections of yourself.'' People went on about death bringing friends together, but it wasn't true. The graveyard, the stony dirt - that's what it was like now. They knew each other better than their own siblings, but Sylvie's death had opened up strange caverns of distance between them. Four older women with a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three. Can they survive together without her? They are Jude, a once-famous restaurateur, Wendy, an acclaimed public intellectual, and Adele, a renowned actress now mostly out of work. Struggling to recall exactly why they've remained close all these years, the grieving women gather for Christmas at Sylvie's old beach house - not for festivities, but to clean the place out before it is sold. Without Sylvie to maintain the group's delicate equilibrium, frustrations build and painful memories press in. Fraying tempers, an elderly dog, unwelcome guests and too much wine collide in a storm that brings long-buried hurts to the surface - and threatens to sweep away their friendship for good. The Weekend explores growing old and growing up, and what happens when we're forced to uncover the lies we tell ourselves. Sharply observed and excruciatingly funny, this is a jewel of a book, a celebration of tenderness and friendship that is nothing short of a masterpiece. ...Show more

The Salt Madonna by Catherine Noske

$32.99 AUD

Category: Aust Fiction

This is the story of a crime. This is the story of a miracle. There are two stories here. Hannah Mulvey left her wind-lashed island home as a teenager. But her stubborn, defiant mother is dying, and Hannah has returned to Chesil, taking up a teaching post at the tiny schoolhouse, doing what she can in the long days of this final year. Like her mother, the island is not as once it was. Isolation, the salt-struck land, a failing harvest, and better prospects elsewhere have left their mark on a community clinging desperately to the edge of the coast. But gradually, so that Hannah cannot pinpoint exactly when it begins, the community begins to unravel. There are odd reports, rumours. A girl disappears from her classes. People gather and mutter on street corners, meet at strange hours, flock together as a silent force. Even as an outsider, Hannah can see their increasingly strange behaviour towards her young charge... The truth lies with those who speak loudest... Catherine Noske's suspenseful and provocative novel turns on a single, terrible event. It is a gripping portrayal of a remote community caught up in a collective moment of madness, of good intentions turned terribly awry; a blistering examination of truth and power, and how we might distinguish one from the other. ...Show more