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Emily Ballou

Aphelion

Literary Fiction
Picador, Australia, late 2005
All rights excl. ANZ available

A story that spans four generations and fifty yeras, Aphelion takes us on a journey to the dark side of love, loss and regret, and back out again into the light.

A victim of the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme, the small valley town of Adaminaby now lies under the waters of Lake Eucambene. And on the shores of the new lake, three remaining houses, two remaining families.

Rhett Butler, after years overseas, has returned to his family home following his beloved mother's death. He is the last living member of his extended family. And next door, the Harts, four generations of women, the eldest 102, sharing one house: Hortense, Esme, Byrne and Lucetta, Rhett's lost childhood love.

Esme, at eighty-two, is waiting patiently for her turn to die. Only, a person is not meant to die before their mother. It's just a matter of principle, she feels. Doesn't she deserve some mother-free years? But Hortense, who still drives her V-8 too fast, shows no sign of being finished with the business of living.

Byrne's daughter Lucetta can remove a cow's eye and stitch up the socket, but has never got over the look of shock on the face of a dead pig. She lost her first love five years ago, drowned in the lake. The sight of Rhett's face calls up things long buried.

When Hazel Bird, an archivist with the Natural History Museum, arrives to create an exhibition about the flooding of the town of Adaminaby, she stirs up old memories and family secrets. But as Hazel cobbles together something that will speak to the dream of the past and Rhett free-dives the remains of the drowned town, Lucetta and Esme find reason to open their hearts again.

The day of the exhibition should bring everybody together, but not everybody will make it there...

About the author

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1968, Emily Ballou graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's filmmaking department in 1992 and moved to Australia. Emily was chosen as one of the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists in 2003 and was the winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize in 1997. Emily also writes for film and television and is currently adapting her critically acclaimed first novel, Father Lands, for the screen.
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Emily Ballou

Father Lands

Literary Fiction
Picador, Australia, 2002
All rights excl. ANZ available

Father Lands is the story of family forces, absent fathers and the pain of history.

The world of eight-year-old Cherry Laurel is an intensely sensual one - of cold noses, burning autumn leaves, changes of season, changes of heart, childhood, nationhood.and betrayal. Her mother, beautiful, free spirited Bell and her father, Jackson, a talented but troubled botanist, are failing to cope with the catastrophe of domestic life. Just another day in your average Midwest 1970s American family. But now Cherry has been volunteered for an 'historical experiment'. Milwaukee's notoriously racially segregated public school system is about to pursue an active policy of integration. Cherry and her younger sister are about to be bussed in, unaware that the shame of white America awaits them.

During the autumn of that upside-down year, as Cherry attempts to learn the secret languages of leaves, her father leaves his wife and kids to endure the winter blizzards on their own, while Cherry's only friend, the wistful Hugo, haunted by family tragedy, is determined to find his own lost father.

About the author

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1968, Emily Ballou attended Lloyd Street School as part of the bussing program from 1976. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's filmmaking department in 1992 and moved to Australia. Emily was chosen as one of the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists in 2003 and was the winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize in 1997. Emily also writes for film and television, is currently adapting Father Lands for the screen and has just completed her second novel, Aphelion.

Reviews

"What is particularly impressive about this as a first novel is the fullness of its narrative, the sympathy with which it enters into all of its characters' lives, the completeness of their world.Ballou is a talented writer." Australian Book Review

"..there is a remarkable poise and consistency of voice.You immediately know you are on a journey with an author who can deliver the promise of the first, fluid sentence." The Age

".it is the dream of family that Father Lands most evocatively examines: its failures and its lasting fascinations." Sydney Morning Herald

"Poignant, funny and acutely observed, this is a fresh take on dysfunctional families, and black-and-white friendship." Sun-Herald
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Tony Brecker

Genuine Remorse

Commercial Fiction/Thriller
Manuscript on offer

Every villain has a story to tell. Some of them even have a book to sell. Ron Todd, a London East End career criminal has killed a pregnant woman in a jewellery store robbery gone wrong. Serving 21 years in Wandsworth Prison for her murder, he writes his autobiography and it becomes a bestseller.

For Daniel Stewart, whose wife and unborn baby were killed by Todd, it's proof that the world has gone crazy, that justice is not served. For Daniel, only one thing will redress the balance - Todd's death. But how do you kill a man who will be in prison for the next 20 years?

Using his skills as a systems analyst, Daniel researches crime and punishment and gets himself banged up in Wandsworth Prison, just like Todd. Daniel needs all his wits to survive the prison jungle where Todd is revered, and all his nerve to go through with his revenge and kill the man who murdered his wife.

About the author

After dropping out of a degree in Pure Mathematics, Tony Brecker worked as a boardman in a betting shop, then sold double glazing, typewriters, became a croupier, went to Majorca for a spell as a nightclub DJ, before finding his feet as a copywriter in a London advertising agency.

Seven years ago he moved to Australia and now lives on the mid-north coast of New South Wales with a wife, son and two dogs. Genuine Remorse is the second novel he has written.
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Brian Carbee

Conduct and Courtesy

Commercial Fiction
Manuscript on offer

In 1961, in the industrial town of Groton in the otherwise bucolic state of Connecticut, little Billy Conway witnesses his elderly neighbour burn to death in a mishap involving beer, a barbeque and a large can of accelerant. Dubbed 'the boy who glimpsed into hell' by the local newspaper, Billy has instead had a sneak preview of things to come.

In a matter of days, a horror car crash will, in some way, destroy each member of his family.

Conduct and Courtesy explores the aftermath of a family tragedy and the flexible nature of truth. Through a series of 'accidents', Billy attempts to make his mother's life, as well as his own, more bearable. His lies and schemes are so perfect he believes them to be the truth, transforming himself from a sweet innocent boy, into a sweet innocent boy who lies, steals, attempts murder, commits manslaughter and arson . and has sex with other boys.

As the 'accidents' that surround Billy turn deadly he becomes increasingly certain of his innocence. At the same time, a troublesome boy steals his heart and he is forced to face some hard facts.

In a vein not unlike Augusten Burroughs's Running With Scissors, Conduct and Courtesy is a dark, humorous account of an irrepressible boy who sacrifices his sanity to protect his fragile mother. Billy is a lost soul who gets much more than just a glimpse into hell. In the end, a few small mercies and an old lady who kills cats might just save him.

About the author

Born in the United States, Brian has a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in acting from the University of Connecticut. He worked extensively as a dancer and choreographer in Boston and New York before moving to New Zealand in 1986 where he created over a dozen original works for Limbs Dance Company, danced with Douglas Wright Dance Company in their acclaimed production of Forever and produced Heaven, Hell and Hamilton and Bedrock for his own project based dance company, The Jump Giants.

Moving to Sydney in 1997, Brian created In Search of Mike, a thirty-minute dance theatre piece for InterSteps, which was later adapted into a short film directed by Andrew Lancaster. In Search of Mike was selected for competition at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and was the winner of the Dendy Award and Rueben Mammoullian Award at the 2001 Sydney Film Festival.

Brian is currently writing a screenplay, Accidents Happen, based on this novel, and it has been optioned by Anthony Anderson, producer of internationally acclaimed Somersault.
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Brian Castro

Shanghai Dancing

Literary Fiction
Giramondo Publishing, Australia, 2003
All rights excl. ANZ/US available

Winner 2003 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction
Winner 2004 NSW Premier's Literary Award for Fiction
Winner 2004 NSW Premier's Literary Award for Book of the Year

"Shanghai Dancing is a fictional autobiography, loosely based on my family's life in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macau from the 1930s to the 1960s. Drawing on memory, stories, photos, and family myths and secrets, the book is about the twists and turns of fiction and personal history. I feel this tale has been lurking in the background for quite some time, finding its way out of the labyrinth through dissimulation and story-making." Brian Castro

In its sweep of history, the power of its imagination and sheer literary virtuosity, Brian Castro's Shanghai Dancing is a work of major significance.

Shanghai Dancing challenges our expectations of storytelling. Beautifully and eloquently written, Castro takes as his inspiration his own family history, which encompasses a global migration from the 17th century to present day Sydney. Castro's considerable literary skills turn history into a living, evocative present, a drama in which ancestors become living characters and are so vividly imagined they illuminate for us much of the essence of the Australian story.

About the author

Brian Castro was born in Hong Kong in 1950, and arrived in Australia in 1961. His novels include Birds of Passage, which shared the Australian/Vogel Literary Award; Double Wolf, winner of the Age Fiction Prize and the Victorian Premier's Award for Fiction; After China, which also won the Victorian Premier's Award for Fiction; and Stepper (1997), for which he received the National Book Council Banjo Award.

Reviews

"A marvellous mingling of fiction, memoir and travel writing... one of the best Australian books - or books from anywhere if it comes to that - I've read for a long time" Sydney Morning Herald

".a gorgeous meditation on the interaction of past and present." The Australian

"One of the most intelligent and original of Australian writers is again brought to mind" The Bulletin
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Brian Castro

The Garden Book

Literary Fiction
Giramondo Publishing, Australia, 2005
All rights excl. ANZ/US available

Brian Castro's new novel is set in the Dandenong Ranges in the years between the Depression and the Second World War. The story revolves around Swan Hay, born Shuang He, daughter of a country schoolteacher, her marriage to the passionate and brutal Darcy Damon, and her love affair with the aviator and architect Jasper Zenlin. Fifty years after her disappearance, Norman Shih, a rare book librarian, pieces together Swan's chaotic life from clues found in guest house libraries, antiquarian bookshops and her own elusive writings. But what exactly is his relationship to her?

The Garden Book is about loneliness, addiction, exploitation; it is about the precarious nature of Australian lives, when gripped by fear and racial prejudice. Yet underlying the story, and commanding it, there is the assured beat of Castro's prose, evoking an ideal world beyond these fears, full of richness and power.

About the author

Brian Castro was born in Hong Kong in 1950 of mixed Chinese, Portugese and English ancestry, and arrived in Australia in 1961. His novels include Birds of Passage, which shared the Australian/Vogel Literary Award; Double Wolf, winner of the Age Fiction Prize and the Victorian Premier's Award for Fiction; After China, which also won the Victorian Premier's Award for Fiction; and Stepper (1997), for which he received the National Book Council Banjo Award.

Reviews

"The Garden Book is another triumph of intelligence and imagination by one of the most exacting, yet rewarding of Australian novelists, and when the mood is on him, one of the most amusing as well." Peter Pierce, The Age

"The publication of a Brian Castro book is always met with relief." The Bulletin

"Brian Castro's The Garden Book is that rare species: a new Australian novel with moxie...[It] is also bold because it manages to look our nation directly in the face without a single reference to the three 'Rs' - reconciliation, republicanism and refugees. As a consequence, the book is cool-eyed rather than nostalgic." Australian Book Review

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Brett D'Arcy

The Mindless Ferocity of Sharks

Literary Fiction
Random House, Australia, 2003
All rights excl. ANZ available

Winner of the 2004 WA Premier's Award for Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2005 Colin Roderick Award for Best Australian Book of the Year
Longlisted for the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Eleven-year-old Floaty Boy (so named because of his passion for body-surfing and talent for buoyancy), inhabits a murky, watery world of wagging school and illicit night surfing. He hovers on the edge of things; he is in between - not boy or man - and inhabits liminal spaces: the edge of the ocean when he body surfs and the edges of a family that seems to be spinning out of control.

At the centre of Floaty Boy's universe is Adelaide - mother, wife, lover, intelligent, fecund and feminine, surfer, cook and breadwinner. When her elder son, Floaty Boy's brother, Eddie, disappears, her family's world threatens to fall apart - her centre may not hold and Floaty Boy has to find a way to cope.

About the author

Brett D'Arcy's first novel, The Book of Lonely, was published by Picador in 1999 and is being developed as a film by producer Rosemary Blight (In The Winter Dark, Small Claims). Brett is currently adapting The Mindless Ferocity of Sharks for the screen for producer Mark Patterson.

Reviews

"One of the most unusual and accomplished novels to be published in Australia for years.D'Arcy's achievement is to plumb such despair, while rendering as well the black jesting that attends it." Australian Book Review

"As feckless and lovable as anything Hemingway might have written." The Age

".passionately, distinctively Australian, caricaturing, yet capturing a way of life.illuminated by moments so off-centre and unexpectedly touching that they can take your breath away." The Bulletin

"D'Arcy has written a rites-of-passage novel that is moody and atmospheric. He might just be a successor to fellow West Australians Tim Winton and Robert Drewe." The Sun-Herald
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Tegan Bennett Daylight

Safety

Literary Fiction
Random House, Australia, 2006
All rights excl. ANZ available

Elizabeth has fallen in love in her early adulthood, but with a lack of conviction and disturbing results. In her late twenties she embarks on a new affair with Ross, a fellow academic at her university. Their relationship blooms and offers her the safety she has been searching for since childhood. She moves into his big, old house by the Parramatta River and becomes pregnant. Then Ross's father, who was violent to both Ross and his mother, and disappeared while Ross was still at school, resurfaces. He has been in Spain for fifteen yeras, and now is dying. Elizabeth persuades Ross that the family should make a journey to se him, to makes peace with him and to show him Anna, their new daughter. But their holiday lays bare discomfiting truths and frailties, both in their relationship and their past.

About the author

Born in Sydney in 1969, Tegan Bennett undertook her Bachelor of Arts and Communications at the University of Technology, and she began writing professionally with the Dolly fiction series for teenagers. Since then she has written two children's books as well as Bombora (1996), which was shortlisted for The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and What Falls Away which garnered Tegan the Sydney Morning Herald's award as Young Novelist of the Year, 2001 and was judged "one of the most promising writers to hit the Australian literary scene in years" by reviewers.

Reviews

"a young writer who more than fulfils her early promise" Bulletin

"Bennett Daylight tells this story of troubled thirtysomethings with painful acumen and deceptive simplicity of style...This [is an] admirable excursion from a gifted writer" The Weekend Australian

"Bennett Daylight plays with everyone's expectations but never strikes a note that would sound false..." The Age
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Tegan Bennett Daylight

What Falls Away

Literary Fiction
Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2001
All rights excl. ANZ available

In tight, beautiful prose, Tegan Bennett's long awaited second novel, What Falls Away, touchingly explores a relationship that somehow, some way, has drifted apart despite the existence of love.

'Each day one of them, both of them, added something more to the silence. Carefully, slowly, patiently, they were building a great structure out of it, an intricate structure. Mary participated in the work but wondered, sometimes, if they would have the skill and the tools to dismantle it. It was beginning to block doorways in their own house, to climb up towards the windows, to reach into the garden.'

Mary doesn't quite know what's changed since the birth of her first child, but she and Sean don't talk anymore. While Sean simply shuts down, hoping things will fix themselves, Mary turns to Juliet, her best friend, for comfort.

What Falls Away is an astutely observed, intricately fascinating exploration of the ways in which - sometimes without even noticing - we let silence take over our lives.

About the author

Born in Sydney in 1969,Tegan Bennett undertook her Bachelor of Arts and Communications at the University of Technology, and began writing professionally with the Dolly fiction series for teenagers. Since then she has written two children's books as well as Bombora (1996), which was shortlisted for The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. Tegan lives in Sydney and is a regular book reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald. Prizes: Tegan Bennett was honoured as the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Novelists of the Year in 2001.

Reviews

"What is sure is the deftness with which Bennett handles her material. There is virtually nothing in this book that should not be there - every detail seems to acquire the kind of symbolic inevitability that makes the very best realism so powerful. There are shades of Helen Garner here, or perhaps even the sense of oppression and lives smothered by circumstance that characterises Chekhov." The Age

"One of the most promising writers to hit the Australian literary scene in years." Herald Sun
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Suzanne Hawley

Alison Says

Popular Fiction/Romantic Comedy
Random House, 2005
All rights excl. ANZ available

A book for anyone who has ever drunk and dialled or become a stalker in the name of love.

Wednesday
I can't think of anything to write.

Thursday
I can't think of anything to write.

Margaret ('Maggs') is a drama teacher at a respectable girls high school. She is chronically depressed since being dumped by her boyfriend, Jamie. Alison, Maggs's shrink, suggests that she keep a diary in a bid to help 'reshape those destructive thought patterns and re-align them to a more productive way of life'. The problem is, whatever Alison says, Maggs ignores. She is on the slippery slide to losing it big time - the star attraction in a reality of her own making as she lurches from drunken one-night stands to humiliating episode after humiliating episode.

Will Maggs win back Jamie? Or will she succumb to the devilish charms of the new school janitor, a sexy bit of Irish rough trade?

About the author

Alison Says is Suzanne Hawley's first novel although Suzanne has been writing for theatre, television and film for many years. She won an AFI Award for Best Screenplay for the mini-series adaptation of Robert Drew's The Bodysurfer and received AFI Nominations for writing the screenplays of the mini-series Ring of Scorpio and the feature Wendy Cracked a Walnut. Her plays (Concrete Palaces, Mummy Loves You Betty Ann Jewel and Hitler Had a Mummy Too) have been performed around Australia and Suzanne has written and script edited for many Australian television series.
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Linda Jaivin

The Infernal Optimist

Literary fiction
4th Estate, 2006
All rights excl. ANZ available

Zeki Togan, small time crim in big time trouble. Trouble has a name, Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, and a number, 501, which Zeki learns isn't just a style of jeans.

Zeki, who was born in the Old Country but considers himself as Aussie Aussie Aussie oi, oi, oi as the next bloke has landed in Immigration Detention along with the other crims, asylum seekers, sex slaves, illegal workers and visa overstayers. According to Section 501 of the Migration Act, he is liable for deportation on the basis of character, which he certainly is.

Zeki loves Marlena, She Who He Loves, Honours and Obeys, Most of the Time Anyway, but he's having a hell of a time proving it from the wrong side of a double fence.

Zeki's new friends, the 'asylums' aren't doing so well either. Hamid loves Angel but she needs more than love. April thinks she loves Azad but Azad thinks he love's April's daughter Crystal. Thomas loves any place but where he is. Everyone loves freedom. Not everyone gets it. Everyone wants to survive. Not everyone will.

About the author

Graduating magna cum laude from Brown University, US, with a BA in Asian Studies and Politic Science, Linda went on to study Chinese language at Taiwan Normal University. Linda has worked as the Hong Kong and China correspondent for Asiaweek magazine) and her articles and reviews have appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review, Village Voice (New York), The Age , The Australian , The Sydney Morning Herald , Cinema Papers , Australian Society , The Canberra Times, The Financial Times (London), Australian Women's Forum, Rolling Stone, New Woman, HQ, among others.

Linda Jaivin is the author of the internationally best selling erotic classic Eat Me (published by Text in Australia, Broadway Books in USA, Vintage in UK and in a number of European languages) as well as Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space, Miles Walker, You're Dead and, Dead Sexy. Her non-fiction The Monkey and the Dragon tells the remarkable and true story of a Chinese political activist and pop star who was incarcerated after the Tienamen Square massacre. In recent years, Linda Jaivin has been very active in her support for asylum seekers and refugees in mandatory detention in Australia.
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Linda Jaivin

Eat Me

Erotic/Comic fiction
Text Publishing, 1995 Translation and English Rights - Text Publishing
Film and Television Rights available - the Cameron Creswell Agency

Eat Me, the classic erotic international bestseller has been described as "the sexiest thing to come out of Australia since Mel Gibson...This book does for sex what Absolutely Fabulous did for fashion: it takes a subject we're all passionate about and makes wickedly clever fun of it." (Glamour, USA)

Take a group of female friends of all sexual persuasion (and even perversion!), a handful of sexually charged fantasies, a healthy dose of humour and the fruit and veg section of the local supermarket and you have Eat Me. Focusing on the friendships and sexual foibles of Chantal, Julia, Phillipa and Helen, Eat Me is the original Sex in the City, with a franker and funnier approach to women who want more.
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Nicholas Jose

Original Face

Literary fiction/thriller
Published by Giramondo Press September 2005

Every big city has its Chinatown.

The drama begins with a body dumped in south-western Sydney - skinned, with no face. Lewis Lin, taxi driver, photographer, recent arrival from Beijing, happens to be at the scene. With detectives Ginger Rogers and Shelley Swert in pursuit, Lin finds himself drawn in to a deadly immigration racket with a cast which includes a filmmaker just in from LA, a Buddhist monk, a millionaire bachelor artist, a sexy, beautiful Chinese masseuse, a maniacal violinist and a refugee assassin.

Part thriller, part noir, dark and comic by turns, Original Face is a sensuous and highly coloured portrait of the jostling energies that make up life in a contemporary, in this instance Australian, city.

Drawing its title from an ancient Zen koan - Before your father and mother were born, what was your original face? - the story traces the complicated manoeuvres by which people mask their identities, and the accidental pathways by which these hidden selves come to light.

About the author

Nicholas Jose was Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing from 1987 - 1990 and has written widely on contemporary Asian and Australian culture. He is the author of seven highly regarded novels including Avenue of Eternal Peace, The Rose Crossing and The Red Thread. Avenue of Eternal Peace was adapted into the international mini-series Children of the Dragon (Southern Star Xanadu/Zenith productions for the ABC and the BBC in 1992.
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Mireille Juchau

Burning In

Literary fiction
Giramondo Publishing, Australia, 2006
All rights excl. ANZ available

'Martine wrenched the phone cord from the wall, shouldered the bag and left the apartment, a woman possessed - for the first time in days filled right up with purpose. The afternoon air had a metallic taste. Her feet struck pavements of ice. She wove through the wintry blue light, entering the maw of Manhattan traffic and held her breath till she reached the Park. Her body was snapped into separate parts. She could feel one leg and not the other, her right hand but not the left. This made walking difficult. Her head throbbed from just figuring out how to take the next step.

She will do whatever she can to find her. Sleep in the Park, scour the Ramble, beg every passer-by to keep watch. She will wait it out. As long as it takes.'

When her daughter disappears, Martine Hartmann, Australian photographer, packs a bag and goes to live in Central Park where Ruby was last seen. Later, in the muzac-filled malls of upstate New York, Martine uncovers what has happened to her daughter. The truth unlocks a secret about her Jewish family's past that takes her back to her childhood home in Australia and then to Germany.

With a set of old photos and an address from the Red Cross, Martine walks the bullet-scarred streets of Berlin. What, or who did her mother leave behind when she fled the city in 1938? As Martine pieces together her mother's final days in the city, she is forced to confront her own secrets about Ruby. She plans an exhibition that will be both memorial and visitation.

Structured around two mysteries, Burning In explores the complex obligations we have to the past, the future, and to ourselves. With insight and humour, the novel captures the poignant, profound and sometimes absurd ways that we remember what we have lost.

About the author

Mireille Juchau's first novel, Machines for Feeling, was short listed for the 1999 Australian/Vogel Literary Award, the premier award for Australian writers under 35 years of age. In 2002 her play, White Gifts, won the Perishable Theatre International Women's Playwriting Competition and was performed and published in the US. Her short fiction, essays and reviews are published internationally and in Australia. Mireille has received grants from the Ian Potter Foundation, the New South Wales Ministry for the Arts, the Australia Council for the Arts and recently won the 2004-05 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship to research her third novel.
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Mireille Juchau

Machines for Feeling

Literary fiction
UQP, Australia, 2001
All rights excl. ANZ available

Juchau's writing has received widespread critical acclaim. This is a freshly imaginative, poetic novel, which examines the emotional and psychological rituals of three characters as they try to cope in a world with little time for difference and patience for sensitivity. Machines for Feeling was shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel Award.

About the author

Mireille Juchau's work has been anthologised in Australia and overseas, and in 2000 she was awarded an emerging writer's grant from the Australia Council, a NSW Ministry for the Arts Travel Grant and an Ian Potter Foundation Grant to attend the prestigious New York State Summer Writers' Institute. Mireille Juchau received First Class Honours and the University Medal from the University of Technology, Sydney in 1994, and a doctorate in Writing and Philosophy from the University of Western Sydney in 2000.

Reviews

"This is a beautiful and disturbing novel, about the fallout of the adult world and its impact on the young who will, of course, carry their hurts with them into adulthood." Australian Book Review

"The language of this novel is its major strength, Juchau writes with great clarity to illuminate bleak landscapes." Overland

"Mireille Juchau's strength as a novelist lies in a disarming humour and a beautifully pitched control so evocative it is almost possible to make out the imprint of a hand fading on skin" Good Reading
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Lucy Lehmann

The Easy Part

Young Adult fiction
Manuscript on offer

Thirteen-year-old Sophie is grounded for six months after a bushfire was started on Crosby Hill. The punishment, meted out by her parents, also includes a weekly session with a child psychologist, and, hardest of all, a babysitter - if Sophie were left alone for an evening, what would burn down next?

But Enid, the babysitter, turns out not to be the cranky Bingo-player evoked by her name, but a seventeen-year-old lead-guitarist who is more than willing to share every detail of her mission for the year - to lose her virginity before her eighteenth birthday.

Sophie comes to cherish her evenings with Enid, partly because they fill the gap left by her ex-best friend, Alice; once inseparable, Sophie and Alice haven't spoken since the day of the bushfire. Sophie got grounded for six months, and Alice got an overseas holiday.

From a bean-bag, Sophie lives through Enid's tales of greasy-haired art students, precocious Playstation devotees, rock 'n' roll stars and even a substitute Scripture teacher, but is haunted by a secret - the events surrounding the bushfire. Then one day, on discovering that she and Enid have more in common than a love of graphic detail, Sophie finally gets up from her bean-bag and start living her own life once again.

About the author

Lucy's first novel, The Showgirl and the Brumby, a dark rural comedy set in country New South Wales was shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel Literary Award. It has been optioned and is currently being developed as a television mini-series.
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John Lonie

Out of the Night

Gay fiction
Manuscript on offer
All rights available

'I wanted to write a story about what is was like to be young and gay before the years of gay liberation. My themes are universal, my settings provincial, rather in the same manner as the border trilogy of Cormac McCarthy, a writer whose stories, their metaphysics and language, I admire.' John Lonie

Out of the Night is the story of a 17-old boy and a 24-year-old soldier, whose love for each other turns them into outlaws.

Curtis de Vere is from a wealthy grazing family in Far North Queensland, sent to school in Brisbane, where he lives with his mother, estranged from his father and consumed by good works. He has found an emotional outlet for himself in the nearby park where, nightly, he meets men in silent sexual encounters that assuage, if briefly, his great loneliness. One night in the park Curtis is raped and debased by two low-life men. When Curtis's mother and uncle thwart police attempts to bring the two to justice, Curtis realises he is on his own. Six months later, on a school army cadet exercise with regular army soldiers, Curtis encounters the one he will call the Lion Sergeant, whose name is Jan 'Johnny' Novak. Curtis falls hard for Jan and pursues him, successfully.

When Curtis's mother and uncle discover the truth, they have the boy locked up in a mental asylum for shock treatment and threaten Novak with prison if he doesn't get out of Curtis's life. But Novak knows what he wants and he wants Curtis. So he breaks Curtis out of the asylum and the two go on the run, two thousand kilometres up the Queensland coast to the jungle of the far north, in search of safely.

About the author

John Lonie is a novelist and screenwriter and currently co-head of Screenwriting at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney. A graduate of the Film School himself, he has extensive credits in film and television and is a sought-after script editor and screenwriter, most recently, co-writing the film Kokoda. Recent script editing credits include Ivan Sen's successful feature debut Beneath Clouds, Cannes Prix d'Or winner Laurie McInnes' Dogwatch and Alison Tilson's feature film Japanese Story. His fiction includes short stories in Australian and international anthologies, including Meanwhile in Another Part of the Forest, (Knopf, Canada). Acts of Love, three novellas, was published by Blackwattle Press in 1996.
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Carmelina Marchetta

Saving Francesca

Young Adult fiction
Penguin, Australia / Random House, USA

Francesca battles her mother, Mia, constantly over what's best for her. All Francesca wants is her old friends and her old school, but instead Mia sends her to St. Sebastian's, an all-boys' school that has just opened its doors to girls. Now Francesca's surrounded by hundreds of boys, with only a few other girls for company. All of them weirdos - or worse.

Then one day, Mia is too depressed to get out of bed. One day turns into months, and as her family begins to fall apart, Francesca realizes that without her mother's high spirits, she hardly knows who she is. But she doesn't yet realize that she's more like Mia than she thinks. With a little unlikely help from St. Sebastian's, she just might be able to save her family, her friends, and - especially - herself.

About the author

Carmelina's first novel was the spectacularly popular, best-selling young adult novel Looking For Alibrandi. The film of the same name was a box office hit in Australia... Saving Francesca is published by Penguin in Australia and Random in the US.
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Roger McDonald

The Ballad of Desmond Kale

Literary Fiction
Random House, Australia, late 2005

In the early 1800s, out of the prison society of governors, redcoats, English gaolers, Irish convicts, and the few free settlers of Botany Bay, none had ventured much farther inland than a few dozen miles from Sydney into the vast territory claimed as New South Wales.

Or so it was believed until the escape of Desmond Kale and the vengeance of his rival, the wildly eccentric parson magistrate Matthew Stanton.

The Ballad of Desmond Kale is Roger McDonald's broad-sweeping novel of the first days of British settlement in Australia. At the centre is Stanton's pursuit of Kale - an Irish political prisoner and a rebelliously brilliant breeder of sheep. The alchemy of wool fascinates, threatens, and transforms when it is discovered that fine wool thrives in New South Wales as nowhere else in in the world, producing veritable gold on sheep's backs. The laying to waste of Spain (Britain's chief supplier of fine wools) at the end of the Napoleonic wars, opens vast new opportunities of supply.

The Ballad of Desmond Kale is both a love story of unusual interest and an epic novel of greed, ambition, conceit and redemption. The novel is rich in its characterisations and the rawness of its settings, vigour of language and vividness of personality. The action moves from the early Australian bush to the halls of Westminster, the mills of Yorkshire, the sierras of Spain, the wilds of the Southern Ocean and returns to the far outback for its finale. Once the ballad is sung, ordinary experience is heightened, the world can never be the same again.

About the author

Roger McDonald is the author of the internationally critically acclaimed and multi-award winning novel, Mr Darwin's Shooter. Mr Darwin's Shooter has been published in the UK, US, Canada and translated into a number of European languages. Mr Darwin's Shooter won the NSW Premier's Award for Fiction, the Victorian Premier's Award for Fiction, the Australian National Fiction Award and the South Australian Premier's Literary Award.

Roger McDonald is also the author of several volumes of poetry, travel writing, essays and screenplays including Slipstream and Water Man. His first novel, 1915, was filmed as a television series and his prize-winning book Shearer's Motel was also filmed for television.

Review of Roger McDonald's Mr Darwin's Shooter

"Mr McDonald has given us a work of distinction that should establish him on this side of the world as a widely read man of letters . [His] language is so marvellously taut, his imagery so fresh . that in reading him, you feel newly - and perhaps for the first time in a long time - pleasantly acquainted with unselfish poetry. This writer is supremely generous with his gifts." Boston Globe
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Malla Nunn

A Beautiful Place to Die

Crime fiction
World rights available (on offer in ANZ and South Africa) MANUSCRIPT AVAILABLE

In 1950s South Africa, the colour of a killer's skin matters more than justice.

A captivating debut novel that explores the layers of racial divides in a small South African country town as Detective Emmanuel Cooper tracks the killer of the Afrikaans police Captain of of Jacob's Rest. As Emmanuel navigates his way through the town's labyrinthine partitions of race and class, his position becomes more dangerous and his life at risk as he confronts the ever harsher realities of South Africa under the new apartheid regime.

Malla Nunn combines a thrilling action-oriented plot with a thoughtful and complex portrayal of a particular time and place and the human desires that drive us all, regardless of race, colour or creed.

A Beautiful Place To Die is the first of a planned series of novels featuring Detective Emmanuel Cooper.
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Anthony O'Neill

Lamplighter

Fiction/Horror
HarperCollins (ANZ) 2003
Headline UK
Simon & Schuster US/Canada
Also published in France, Germany, Spain, Italy
Translation rights available

A religious academic is mutilated on one of the city's finest streets. The grave of a famous colonel is ravaged. A shady entrepreneur is slaughtered while dashing for a train. A retired lighthouse-keeper is ripped to shreds while walking his dog.What monster is responsible? Is there a connection between the victims? And what of Evelyn Todd, the anguished young woman who claims to have dreamed the atrocities in detail, and repeatedly blames 'the lamplighter'?

Leading the official investigation is the barely competent Inspector Carus Groves. Pursuing more 'unofficial' lines of inquiry are Thomas McKnight, a jaded philosophy professor, and his compassionate young assistant, Joseph Canavan.

Using every resource at their disposal - reason, logic, intuition and sheer luck - these men must find the killer before the diabolical force is unleashed once again.

About the author

Anthony O'Neill is also the author of Scheherazade, a revisionist Arabian Nights adventure. His books have been published in twelve languages. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Reviews

"As terrifying as a child's nightmares - and as wonderful as waking from them." Kirkus Reviews

"O'Neill is a masterful storyteller and has created characters embodying questions about good and evil, faith and fanaticism.the thrilling story will have [readers] turning the pages compulsively." Publishers Weekly

"O'Neill is a grand storyteller, adept at evoking evil and playing with ambivalence. His lamplighters of the title, the "leeries" of song and legend, shadowy figures who come out at night and stalk their own gargantuan shadows, are the perfect, luciferish start to his dark tale. They light Edinburgh's dangerous streets. But how much illumination do they really provide? Read the book and discover for yourself." The Age

"An awesome thriller. In terms of style alone, O'Neill's book is in a class of its own." Glasgow Herald

Anthony O'Neill

Scheherezade

Fiction
HarperCollins (ANZ) 2001
HarperCollins UK 2002
Translation rights available

Ninth-century Baghdad, legendary crossroads of the Eat. It is nearly twenty years since Scheherazade spun her tales for a thousand and one nights, the tales that saved her life and immortalised the city that she had never seen - until now. But almost immediately she is kidnapped by a party of hashish-chewing assassins from under the Caliph of Baghdad's nose.

An ancient prophecy leads the Caliph to dispatch an unlikely crew of sailors on a rescue mission. As they venture deeper into the unforgiving desert, losing camels, supplies, and all sense of direction, Scheherazade must face her abductors alone. And once again begins to spin a tale to save her life...

An adventure full of wit, danger and incident, murder and mystery, poetry and philosophy - and testament to the power of the imagination - Scheherazade sweeps from the historical realities of Arabian life into a world of magic carpets and miraculous beings, seamlessly weaving fact, fiction and fable into a novel rich with all the heady power of the Arabian Nights.

About the author

Anthony O'Neill is the author of The Lamplighter, a tale of the macabre. His books have been published in twelve languages. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Reviews

"O'Neill's lovingly crafted debut novel stands head and shoulders above the current run of ancient historical novels." The Age

"Like his heroine, O'Neill knows how to tell a story." The Times

"O'Neill writes with authority, blending fact, fiction and fable in this brilliant debut.I enjoyed this book immensely. It is so alive you can almost smell the air. O'Neill spins his own fantastic tales to match the original stories, packing his pages with vivid imagery, woven together with wit, philosophy, poetry, eroticism and memorable characters." The Independent on Sunday

"As well as being a considerable piece of storytelling, this is a striking testament to the power of the imagination." Publishing News, UK

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B Michael Radburn

Sleepwalker

Commercial fiction/Mystery-Thriller

Glory's Crossing is a small ex-logging town on the fringes of Tasmania's natural wilderness, a dying town about to be consumed by a massive dam project. It's where Taylor Bridges, a National Parks Ranger has come to grieve following the mysterious disappearance of his young daughter 12 months previously. Taylor has left his wife, his job and the unsolved mystery of his daughter's disappearance back on the mainland.

On the edge of this small town, Taylor watches the magnificent, doomed forest and the wildlife, sleeping only to sleepwalk, racked with guilt and sorrow and sustained by middle of the night phone calls to his estranged wife who is unable to help him come to terms with their loss. It's only when a young girl goes missing, on the anniversary of his own daughter's disappearance that Taylor sees an opportunity to redeem himself, and perhaps his marriage, if only he can find the missing girl alive.

Taylor's investigation reveals Glory's Crossing has many dark and sinister secrets including a long, unexplained history of missing children. As he comes closer to the truth, Taylor becomes convinced that the mystery of this missing child holds the key to the secret of his own daughter's disappearance.

Gothic, with a strong sense of place, Sleepwalker is both a gripping mystery as well as a story of personal, communal and natural redemption. At its heart is the sadness of a man estranged from his wife and himself, who must find a way to lay his grief to rest and go home.
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David Rollins

The Death Trust

Commercial fiction/Thriller
Pan Macmillan, Australia, late 2005
All rights excl. ANZ

When the commander of the vast NATO Ramstein Air Base in Germany, US General Abraham Scott, is killed in what appears to be an unfortunate glider accident, Washington reluctantly sends its only available investigator - washed-up Special Agent Vincent Cooper.

When sabotage turns out to have been the cause of the crash, Special Agent Cooper suddenly finds himself immersed in a murder investigation that's also highly sensitive - the General's widow is the daughter of the US Vice President. Cooper, recently divorced and now re-married to the bottle, pulls himself together and discovers that the apparently fine, upstanding General Scott was anything but: for one, he kept a beautiful sex slave in a secret apartment. And so begins an investigation that takes Cooper and his reluctant partner, Special Agent Anna Masters, from the biggest air base in Europe to the streets of Baghdad, from the headquarters of people-smugglers in Riga to harrowing combat operations against the Russian army with Chechen rebels.

Through it all, Cooper and Masters survive being drugged, abducted, beaten, mugged, shot up and rocketed. Along the way they uncover a plot so monstrous that it threatens to engulf the US military-industrial complex in a scandal of explosive proportions, and to destroy the very fabric of contemporary American society.

If Nelson De Mille and Robert Ludlum collaborated with Raymond Chandler, the result could be The Death Trust. The plot is dense, with more twists and turns than a bucket of snakes. The novel, written in the first person, has a wry tone of voice - Special Agent Cooper's - and he has just enough rough edges to become one of fiction's enduring characters.

About the author

David A Rollins began writing his first novel at the age 40. At that stage in his life, he'd already parachuted, raced motorcycles, boxed, earned his aerobatic pilot's licence and driven sports cars. There was very little room to manoeuvre when it came to expressing his mid-life crisis, except of course to change career paths. So he threw in his job as a successful, award-winning advertising writer/creative director to try his hand at being an international best-selling thriller novelist. This has so far proved to be his riskiest undertaking yet.

Rollins's first two novels - Rogue Element (2003) and Sword of Allah (2004) - followed the exploits of Tom Wilkes, a combat sergeant in the Australian SAS, and were bestsellers in Australia. He is currently dividing his time between freelance advertising and journalism, and researching his next novel. He lives in Sydney with his wife and three children.
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David Rollins

Sword of Allah

Commercial fiction/Thriller
Pan Macmillan, Australia, 2004
All rights excl. ANZ available

In Papua New Guinea, villagers are armed with AK-47s.

In the Persian Gulf, a fishing boat has a sinister cargo.

At a luxury hotel in Manila, a 'financial planner' has a rendezvous with men on the world's Most Wanted list.

And in Canberra, top intelligence and police specialists assemble to find out why international terrorists are joining forces in Australia's back yard. Present is Sergeant Tom Wilkes of the Australian SAS who is seconded to the CIA where he spearheads the team set up to fight the latest extremist threat. It is a plan more monstrous than anyone - even the experts - could have foretold.

About the author

David A Rollins, a self-confessed adrenalin junkie, is a former advertising creative director who lives with his wife and three children in Sydney. He's currently working on his fourth novel.

Reviews

".a fast paced plot.captures well the fears and prejudices that prevail after September 11." Daily Telegraph

"Pacy and packed with action and firepower. If you are a fan of this genre you will not be disappointed." Brisbane News, Pick of the Week

"Satisfying, complex and, like all good thrillers, comes with a few snappy hair-pins in the plot to keep you guessing." Adelaide Advertiser
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David Rollins

Rogue Element

Commercial fiction/Thriller
Pan Macmillan, Australia, 2003
Translation rights available. English-language rights: Sheila Crowley, AP Watt, UK

In the Hawaiian office of the National Security Agency, an electronic intruder within a Government computer network is detected. An unusual radio signal and non-routine troop movements in Indonesia raise suspicions further.

An air traffic controller at Denpasar Airport is shocked by the sudden disappearance of Flight QF1 from his screen.

The sickening groan of metal breaking up plunges Joe Light and his fellow passengers into everyone's worst nightmare. The 747 is screaming towards earth. On board there is sheer panic.

The news of the downing of the plane in Indonesian airspace is only the beginning of Australian Prime Minister Bill Blight's crisis. ASIO and the NSA piece together a frightening scenario in the face of Indonesia's denial of any knowledge of what happened to the aircraft - one that will pit Australia's crack Special Air Services troops, led by Sergeant Tom Wilkes, and aided by the US Marines, in a desperate covert battle to avert all-out war.

About the author

David A Rollins, a self-confessed adrenalin junkie, is a former advertising creative director who lives with his wife and three children in Sydney. Rogue Element was his first novel, followed, in 2004 by Sword of Allah. His third novel is The Death Trust, which is also published Pan Macmillan.

Reviews

"Shrieks across the page like a scramjet and hits home like a small nuke." John Birmingham, author of Weapons of War

"A thrilling tale told at top speed and with contemporary relevance ... exciting stuff." Gold Coast Bulletin
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Eva Sallis

The Marsh Birds

Literary fiction
Allen & Unwin, Australia, May 2005
All rights excl. ANZ available

This is the story of Dhurgham, a young Iraqi who has lost everything. A powerful, exquisitely written novel that gives a human face to the experiences of exile and migration.

Dhurgham al-Samarra'i is a twelve-year-old boy, the youngest child in a middle-class Baghdadi family. He finds himself at the Great Mosque in Damascus in Syria, not knowing what has happened to his parents and sister who fled Baghdad with him. The only thing he knows is that he was told that if the family became separated they were to meet at the Mosque. Alone, he waits and waits.

This is the story of what befalls Dhurgham after he realises his family won't be turning up. It is the story of his journey into adulthood, his journey through bitterness to forgiveness, and his journey from Iraq to Syria, to Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and beyond.

Detained after arriving in Australia, Dhurgham, resilient yet unable to deal with his past, becomes an untried criminal existing in limbo as his file is processed. Fleetingly, New Zealand offers a refuge, family and affection but he is caught again in a nightmare of red-tape and confinement until his hope turns into anger and his past must be faced and resolved.

What do you do when you belong nowhere, with no family, no homeland, and no hope for the future? Who do you become?

A searingly honest story about separation, journeys and unbearable injustice.

About the author

Eva Sallis has an MA in literature and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Adelaide where she now teaches. She won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 1997 for her first novel, Hiam. Her other novels are The City of Sealions and Fire Fire. Her most recent book, a collection of short stories entitled Mahjar, won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Short Stories in 2004. Eva Sallis is currently serving as president of Australians Against Racism.
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Eva Sallis

Mahjar

Literary fiction
Allen & Unwin, Australia, May 2005
All rights excl. ANZ, US available

Winner 2004 Queensland Premier's Steele Rudd Award for Short Stories

Zein, Farhan, Rayya and their circle are migrants of the 1950s, yearning for both their future and their past. Their children, Salah, Rima, Hussein and their friends are young Australians with a distinctive voice and place, succeeding or failing in the clash between generations, struggling for independence in the face of their parents' hopes and dreams. Abdal-Rahman is an Iraqi refugee who has lost everything. And Ali, Ahmad, Akram and Yusuf are children in Palestine and Baghdad who have no future but whose stories soar.

Mahjar is about lives, journeys and stories, about exile and the experiences that push people to new homelands. Through interwoven stories and fables, it evokes an intimate connection with the Middle East as well as the joys of living in a new land.

About the author

Eva Sallis has an MA in literature and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Adelaide where she now teaches. She won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 1997 for her first novel, Hiam. Her other novels are The City of Sealions and Fire Fire. Her most recent book, a collection of short stories entitled Mahjar, won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Short Stories in 2004. Eva Sallis is currently serving as president of Australians Against Racism.

Reviews

"It's a book full of wisdom and treasured gentle moments." Bulletin

"In deceptively simple prose and syntax, Sallis surveys the gamut of experiences affecting the displaced migrant.Mahjar is an engaging collection of stories that appeals to head and heart." Australian Book Review

"Simultaneously lucid and humorous, Sallis's.disarmingly simple prose is.extremely effective. Sallis demonstrates an equally impressive ability to explicate the sad and bewildering side to being an immigrant." Sydney Morning Herald
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Jan Scherpenhuizen

Profile of Evil

Manuscript on offer

Tina MacLean lives for her work. Sharp and street-smart, the Homicide Squad detective from the Victorian city of Geelong knows pretty much all there is to know about humans and their behaviour.

But now she's met her match.

A vicious, ritualistic killing in sleepy Geelong sets Tina and her colleagues on an ever more bizarre course as they investigate the dark underbelly of the town. After another victim is found, Tina herself comes under attack, and she starts to doubt her own invincibility.

Suddenly her former boyfriend, and fellow detective, Angus Holland catches a suspect and they can all breathe easily. All that remains is to work out how this seemingly untalented, unsophisticated teenager in their custody can turn into a vicious, driven - and, dare they say it, evil - psychopath in front of their very eyes.

Then another body turns up. There is another killer - just as vicious, just as driven, and probably an accomplice of their first suspect.

As Tina is drawn deeper and deeper into the almost insane world of the killers, and as she finds herself increasingly under threat from both unseen assailants and her own mind, she starts to suspect those closest to her of some kind of involvement in the murders: her partner, Vince; Angus, and her new lover, Christian. Their efforts to help become attempts to get her out of the way; every gesture of care seems like an act of mistrust in her abilities.

And then there is the enigmatic Edgar Balman. He is Tina's mentor - her demigod in the world of criminal profiling. She turns to him for help with the case, and for her own disintegrating mind. Balman may well hold the key to both - but will Tina find out before she is consumed by the case and its consequences?

Jan Scherpenhuizen's taut, tense debut thriller keeps you guessing from the first page right until the very end as it delivers its spine-tingling profile of evil ...
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Richard Tulloch

Weird Stuff series 1

Weird Stuff
Brian Hobble isn't much of a writer - he's more of a soccer player. (And sometime she's not much of a soccer player either!) But one day he borrows a pink Easyflow pen from Nathan Lumsdyke, and he can't stop writing. Unfortunately for Brian, the pen only writes flowery, embarrassing love stories, even in his science test. Brian can't wait to give the weird pen back.until he realises Cassandra Wyman is a lot more interested in writing than she is in soccer.

Freaky Stuff
In this story Brian has to escape from a savage dog as big as a sabre-toothed tiger, rollerblade down a ramp from 17,000,000,000 kilometres high, rescue his stupid little brother from flesh-eating zombies and, nost terrifying of all, kiss a girl Prepare to be freaked!

Awesome Stuff
Brian Hobble is back! In this awesome adventure he discovers that he is a genius. He's great at everything, even drama and rock climbing. He finds out he can tell brilliant lies, beat aliens in a laser lance duel and.write love poems that make girls really go for him. But he still doesn't know if Cassie Wyman thinks he is cute because something very weird is happening to his nose.

About the author

Richard Tulloch is one of Australia's most popular writers of books, plays, film and television for young audiences. His television series, which include 150 episodes of the phenomenal Bananas in Pyjamas, as well as episodes of Playschool, The Magic Mountain, Petals and Gloria's House, have reached an audience of hundreds of millions around the world.

He has written 40 children's books, many of them published in a number of languages, and more than 50 plays for young audiences, which have been performed in many countries.

Over the past ten years he has performed his ever-changing show Story Man more than a thousand times in theatres, libraries and schools in the USA, Europe and Australia. He has performed in the Scottish International Children's Festival in Edinburgh, the Irish Children's Festival, the 1999 Vancouver International Children's Festival, in international schools in Indonesia, Japan, Germany and Belgium and in many Australian festivals.

Reviews

"Brian is not like most boys. He shows his feelings in his writing, even though most boys think that's not cool. Boys aren't supposed to feel sorry for frogs, are they?" Cassandra Wyman
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Alexis Wright

Carpentaria

Literary fiction
Giramondo Publishing, Australia, 2006
All rights excl. ANZ available

When Elias Smith, a shipwrecked mariner, walks out of the sea and into the Port of Desperance, a small coastal town in the Gulf of Carpenteria, the whole town turns out to watch his arrival. Carpenteria tells the story of what becomes of his life and his eventual return to the sea against the backdrop of two warring Aboriginal groups who have been feuding over a land dispute for more than 400 years.

A great, funny, sprawling and ambitious novel of black and white culture, Carpenteria is narrated by the oracles - the old, traditionally minded people who keep all stories and beliefs from the past to the present. Wright's narrative style is her own brand of magical realism imbued with symbolism and spiritualism from the natural world and the Aboriginal Dreaming as well as the beliefs, customs and superstitions of Judaic/Christian mission teaching. Humorous and intensely original, this novel is 'magic bigtime' - a novel of 'a land full of tricks, a sea full of spirits.'

About the author

Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi people from the highlands of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. Her first novel Plains of Promise (1997) was reprinted several times and was shortlisted in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, The Age Book of the Year and the NSW Premier's Awards; Plains of Promise has been translated into French. Alexis has been involved as a writer and activist in various Aboriginal campaigns, and is in demand at writers' festivals and conferences, most recently in London, Paris, Barcelona and New York City's BAM Next Wave Down Under Festival. She has published award-winning short stories and her other books are the anthology Take Power, celebrating 20 years of land rights in Central Australia and Grog War an examination of the alcohol restrictions in Tennant Creek. Alexis completed Carpentaria with the support of a Fellowship from the Australia Council, and is a judge of the David Unaipon Award for Aboriginal writers.
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John Birmingham

Dopeland

Non-fiction/Humour
Random House, Australia, 2003
All rights excl. ANZ available

Packing a bag full of cash from his naïve publishers and a long list of dodgy underworld characters from Perth to Cairns, John Birmingham steps out on a mission. To seek out new friends, with big bags of dope, and to boldly smoke where no-one has smoked before.

With danger, disaster and madness always threatening to derail the fabulous Dopeland tour, you can safely sit back and enjoy the ride. Birmingham, however, has to deal with stoner babes, narcs, rednecks, politicians, bankers, schoolteachers, student activists and the obligatory Nimbin ferals. It's all there. At least most of it. The research, as one can imagine, became a little hazy.

About the author

John Birmingham tells stories for a living. He is the author of the best-selling comic novel He Died With A Felafel In His Hand (adapted for the stage and now a major feature film) and the sequel, The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco as well as Leviathan, a unauthorised biography of the city of Sydney. John is also a regular contributor to newspapers, magazines and journals among them Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Independent Monthly, Rolling Stone, Playboy and Penthouse. He penned Appeasing Jakarta for the prestigious Quarterly Essay (Black Inc.) and his other books include Off One's Tits, and How To Be A Man.

Reviews

"A raucous, gonzo-style crusade around Australia.Figures suggest almost half a million Australians smoke an average of once a week. A good many of that number will enjoy Dopeland immensely." Rolling Stone

"The verdict: has all of Birmingham's unique charm. Will make you wish you were a pot-head - or glad you are." FHM
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Brian Deegan

Remembering Josh

Non-fiction/Memoir
Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2004
All rights excl. ANZ available

On 12 October 2002, Brian Deegan's son, Joshua, was killed in the terrorist explosion that ripped apart the Sari Club in Bali's Kuta Beach. Through grief and anger, this father has gone on a journey no parent should have to take. He has confronted the ghosts of his son's death, challenged the government's version of the truth and fought for the answers nobody wanted to give.

Raw and powerful, Remembering Josh cuts to the heart of love and honesty. Nobody reading this book will be left unaffected by it.

Remembering Josh is currently being developed as a feature film by screenwriter Robert Caswell (The Doctor, A Cry In The Dark).

About the author

Brian Deegan has spent twenty-five years in criminal law, fifteen years of which have been on the bench. He is extremely proud of his commission but ultimately his children are his life. Since the Bali tragedy, Brian has become the very public face of the families affected by the bombing. He lives in Adelaide with his wife and their two young children - Eloise, 15, and Patrick, 13. He has two children by his first wife - Joshua, 22, and Nicholas, 21.

Reviews

"This book.is about as painful, angry and visceral as any account could possibly be. it is an unruly masterpiece driven by Deegan's ability to get in touch with all his good and bad emotions." Sydney Morning Herald

"Brian Deegan.has regained enough composure in the midst of raging grief to write an account of his child's death and his own loss of innocence.With courage and a prose style nearly clumsy with heartache.His challenges to our self-perception as a conscious, free-thinking people do not miss their mark." The Age

"Just as the lump in the throat and the misty eyes make reading difficult, Deegan informs and challenges us about the smokescreens erected by our country's leaders and bureaucrats." Good Reading Magazine
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Abbas el-Zein

Leave to Remain

Literary non-fiction/memoir
World rights available (on offer in ANZ)

Leave to Remain: Chronicles of a Foreign Arab is a memoir about growing up in a middle-class Muslim family in civil-war Beirut, a city in the throes of self-destruction, yet obstinately clinging to its cosmopolitan past.

The book traces the genesis of a contemporary Middle-Eastern identity; the author's own, under the influence of culture, religion, history and places far removed from where he grew up; Najaf and Baghdad, Paris and the American far west. With him we travel through a Middle-Eastern life, with an eye on the mundane and the everyday, as well as the cataclysmic events overshadowing them-from the changing hairdos of his mother and the comic books of his childhood, to the violent death of his grandmother, Arab Israeli wars, Wahhabi fundamentalism, September 11 and the invasion of Iraq.

The thoughtful, often gentle nature of this memoir is at odds with the horrors it describes: the ripping apart of lives and the destruction of a country. Leave to Remain offers a reflection on today's Middle-East and the conflicted identities of its inhabitants. It has particular relevance for the thousands of Australians whose families immigrated here from the Middle East, and those who may still feel torn between two places and identities.
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Dr Karl Kruzselnicki

New Moments in Science series
Vol. 1 Bumbreath, Botox & Bubbles
Vol. 2 Q & A with Dr K
Vol. 3 Fidgeting Fat, Exploding Meat and Gobbling Whirly Birds
Vol. 4 Munching Maggots, Noah's Flood and TV Heart Attacks
Vol. 5 Flying Lasers, Robofish and Cities of Slime
Vol. 6 Pigeon Poo, The Universe and Car Paint


Popular science
Harper Collins, Australia, 1996-2003
Various rights available

There's an old scientific saying, 'It's not the answer that gets you the Nobel Prize, it's the question.' Dr Karl Kruszelnicki has engaged, enthused, excited and amused readers of all ages with his series of popular science books which ask, and answer, questions like: How can you resuscitate a man via his penis? If you're caught in the rain, should you walk or run? Is there life elsewhere in our Solar System? Why are people called Smith heavier than people called Taylor? What causes that vile 'morning breath' when you first wake up?

With sales of over 250 000 in Australia alone, Dr Karl explores the science of biscuit dunking, botox, bubbles and bumbreath, the chemistry of farting and the weird and wonderful discoveries of scientists around the world with panache and humour in this series of books.

About the author

Karl Kruszelnicki - or Dr Karl as he is commonly known - used to be a 'proper pukka scientist, engineer and doctor', but is currently an author and science commentator on Australian and UK radio and television. He is the Julius Sumner Miller Fellow at the University of Sydney's Physics Department and was awarded the (US) Ignobel Prize for Science .for his work on belly button fluff!

Dr Karl has degrees in Physics, Mathematics, Biomedical Engineering, Medicine and Surgery.

Reviews

"The strange facts and freaky discoveries just keep on coming. Dr Karl teases and tempts us by debunking (or not) common urban myths." Sydney Morning Herald

"Not only [teaches] .you a lot about things you never even thought about before, but you'll have a good laugh while you take it all in." Woman's Day

"Web radio's first international star has to be Dr Karl Kruszelnicki this year raising a British tabloid stink with his fart experiment." Sunday Times, London
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Jane Meredith

Stories My Lovers Told Me

Non-fiction/memoir
World rights available (on offer in ANZ)

An intimate sexual memoir exploring twenty-one of the author's love affairs. The defining story of each lover's life, as told to or observed by the narrator (author), is set beside an evocation of the love-making between the narrator and the lover. By the combination of these two different stories, the role that their relationship with the narrator plays in their life is brought vividly into focus.

The narrator's own story is woven between these other stories - that of a sensual, intelligent woman looking for love through a series of partially satisfactory relationships. More broadly commented upon are issues of revealed desires, the development of an individual's character from childhood into maturity and the differing ways people conduct their intimate, sexual relationships.

Stories My Lovers Told Me is substantially different to recently published books in this genre of women's sexual memoirs, in covering a large number of sexual relationships in depth and in focusing on the background and beliefs of the lovers, rather than the narrator. It is not a single, sequential narrative and seeks to explore broad questions of the desires and behaviour of both men and women in intimate relationships, the self-creation stories that people tell themselves and others and the potent overlap of those stories with relationship events and outcomes.

The stylised format of devoting each chapter to one love affair frames the lovers' stories and heightens the broader, thematic focus that spans the entire book; that of the psychological patterns of people's lives and the breadth and depth of one woman's sexual experiences through the medium of many relationships.
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Robin Osborne

Hobbit Island: In the Footsteps of Flores Man

History/Anthropology/Culture
Manuscript on offer
All rights available

'If you care for journeys there and back, out of the comfortable Western world, over the edge of the Wild, and home again. here is a record of such a journey and such a traveller.' J.R.R. Tolkien, introduction to the original edition of The Hobbit

In late October 2004, sparked by an article in the September 2004 issue of Nature magazine, news flew around the world that an Australian-Indonesian scientific team had discovered skeletons of tiny, adult-aged, human-like creatures in a cave on the eastern Indonesian island of Flores.

Centring on the remarkable discovery of the remains of Flores Man in the cave complex at Liang Bua, Hobbit Island is a portrait of a complex and fascinating island society. It will take the reader on a tour through Flores, both now and also through the tunnel of history where geological, biological and cultural events created phenomena whose results can still be seen, or remembered, today.

It is a trip in the footsteps of a civilisation of human-like creatures that has vanished, for reasons still unknown, and a contemporary, yet traditional and impoverished, society that inhabits the modern state of Indonesia with the fifth largest population in the world.

About the author

A former speechwriter to Sir Julius Chan and Paias Wingti (Prime Ministers of Papua New Guinea), Robin Osborne is a writer and journalist with considerable experience in Southeast Asia, including extensive coverage of Indonesia. He speaks the Indonesian language and is the author of a well-received book on Indonesian politics, Indonesia's Secret War: the Guerilla Struggle in Irian Jaya, recently translated into Indonesian and published by the Elsam Study and Human Rights Institute of Jakarta. Robin Osborne has contributed articles on Irian Jaya/West Papua, East Timor and Indonesia to a range of publications, including the Australian, Bulletin, National Times and Far Eastern Economic Review.
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Justine Shaw

No Prize for the Running Rabbit

Memoir/current affairs (Zimbabwe)
World rights available (on offer in ANZ)

As a young Zimbabwean woman struggles to become a mother, her country's rebirth is destroyed by relentless violence, corruption and fear. This moving, extraordinary account of life in modern-day Zimbabwe reveals the daily ordeals for many of its citizens in simply driving, shopping and walking the streets, and how a once-proud nation is collapsing under the degenerate government of Robert Mugabe.

Justine Shaw was born in Zimbabwe, and spent an idyllic childhood under its sun. She cherished her memories of carefree days immersed in the natural beauty of her homeland. But by the time she had married and was thinking about starting her own family, life for 'British' Zimbabweans was becoming dangerous, and for many of its black African citizens it was desperately hopeless.

However, Justine had other concerns: although she and husband Ross were young and healthy, parenthood was not coming easily. As their attempts to fall pregnant became seemingly more futile, Justine focused on achieving that goal to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Mothering in a country like Zimbabwe - with its food and fuel shortages, constant civil unrest and endless uncertainties - is even more challenging, and the new reality of babies and extra responsibilities was made more harsh for the Shaws by the constantly fluctuating reality of life in their homeland.

How Justine manages motherhood and marriage, trying to keep her family safe, trying to keep herself sane - through attempted car-jackings, a terrifying home invasion, the exodus of her friends and extended family, the pitiful disintegration of the country she loves - makes for an intimate, confronting and extremely powerful account unlike anything you have ever read. It is a story the world has not yet heard, and which the Zimbabwean government would no doubt want to remain unvoiced. But it is a story that must be told if we are to understand the truth of living under such a regime - whether it is in Zimbabwe, Iraq or Burma. The wonder of Justine's story is that she still strives to find hope, inspiration and joy, not just in her children, but in the very country that brings so much despair.
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