In her flat above Drylands' newsagency, Janet Deakin is writing a book for the world's last reader. Little has changed in her 50 years, except for the coming of cable TV. Loneliness is almost a religion, and still everyone knows your business.But the town is being outmanoeuvred by drought and begins to empty, pouring itself out like water into sand. Small minds shrink even smaller in the vastness of the land. One man is forced out by council rates and bigotry; another sells his property, risking the lot to build his dream. And all of them are shadowed by violence of some sort―these people whose only victory over the town is in leaving it.

Product Description: This stylish reissue of one of Thea Astley’s finest early novels is a classic story of small-town life. Two schoolteachers are drawn to each other by their concern for a lonely young girl. As long as Vinny Lalor could remember she had been on the fringe of things—in her family and at school...read more

Product Description: In her flat above Drylands' newsagency, Janet Deakin is writing a book for the world's last reader. Little has changed in her 50 years, except for the coming of cable TV. Loneliness is almost a religion, and still everyone knows your business...read more

At the center of these eight interconnected tales of Australian life is the brooding narrator Leverson, a keen observer of the varied human types flooding into beautiful Queensland, whose every story explores human weakness and strength

Product Description: Leverson, the narrator at the centre of these stories, calls himself a 'people freak'. Seduced by north Queensland's sultry beauty and unique strangeness, he is as fascinated by the invading hordes of misfits from the south as by the old established Queenslanders...read more

Product Description: An account of life in Australia during the 19th century focusing on Cornelius Laffey, who wrests his family from the easy living of Sydney and takes them to Cooktown in Queensland where thousands of diggers are searching for gold and where the horror of Aboriginal dispossession confronts them...read more

With her husband gone and her memory failing, Kathleen faces old age alone, until her children's callousness and self-absorption force her to take dramatic steps to retain her beloved freedom. By the author of The Slow Natives.

Torn apart by conflict, the Leversons--music teacher Bernard, bored with his marriage and career; his unfaithful wife, Iris; and their rebellious teenage son, Keith--rediscover new meaning in their lives and relationships through tragedy.

In The Genteel Poverty Bus Company, a lone man foils the capitalistic efforts of a developer-magnate, and the same developer's wife leaves her fat-cat husband for a mission at Bukki Bay in Inventing the Weather.

A young Australian woman, the daughter of an American musician, looks back on the people and forces that shaped her life

Product Description: The story of Taws, an Australian town about to celebrate its 20th anniversary. But one man is not about to celebrate. Returning from 15 years exile, he is intent on reminding the town of the brutal acts they perpetrated during their early years of settlement.

On Kristi, a tiny Pacific island jointly ruled by France and England, a group of half-castes, native Melanesians, and sympathetic colonials grab for independence and Gavi Salway, grandson of an old-time planter, is torn between loyalties

Product Description: This novel about the Laffey family, set in turn-of-the-century Australia, is written by the author of "Well-Dressed Explorer", one of three of her novels which have won the Miles Franklin Award and "A Kindness Cup" which won the Australian Book of the Year Award in 1975.

George Brewster, an Australian journalist, travels from city to city and mistress to mistress convinced of his own wisdom

A school teacher decides that she must try to escape from a road-worker's obsessive love for her

Wafer seeks out a place safe from the threat of war and settles in the remote town of Allbut in Queensland, Australia

A group of tourists try to escape from their dissatisfaction with life on a trip to a tropical island, but find their plans disrupted by a hurricane