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  1. Melbourne in Words

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Melbourne in Words

Large turbulence

Turbulence by Thuy On

$22.99 AUD

Category: Poetry

In this intensely personal collection, On explores loss, separation and renewal, online dating, sex, longing, rejection and desire. Though they are personal and confessional, taken from the authors own life, these poems speak to anyone who’s ever loved and lost.  Filled with short sharp burst of emotion , this stunning debut seeks to untangle the messiness of human relationships. ...Show more

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Large 9781922268358

Monkey Grip by Helen Garner

$19.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

Helen Garner's gritty, lyrical first novel divided the critics on its publication in 1977. Today, Monkey Gripis regarded as a masterpiece--the novel that shines a light on a time and a place and a way of living never before presented in Australian literature: communal households, music, friendships, chi ldren, love, drugs, and sex. When Nora falls in love with Javo, she is caught in the web of his addiction; and as he moves between loving her and leaving, between his need for her and promises broken, Nora's life becomes an intense dance of loving and trying to let go. Helen Garneris one of Australia's finest authors. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Her novels include Monkey Grip, The Children's Bach, Cosmo Cosmolinoand The Spare Room. I rolled and rolled in the water, deafening my ears while I thought of, and discarded, all the reasons why I shouldn't go. I popped up, hanging on to the rail, hair streaming on my neck. 'OK. I'll come.' Javo was looking at me. So, afterwards, it is possible to see the beginning of things, the point at which you had already plunged in, while at the time you thought you were only testing the water with your toe. 'Garner is a natural storyteller.' James Wood, New Yorker 'Her use of language is sublime.' Scotsman 'This is the power of Garner's writing. She drills into experience and comes up with such clean, precise distillations of life, once you read them they enter into you. Successive generations of writers have felt the keen influence of her work and for this reason Garner has become part of us all.' Australian 'Its embattled characters are so real that by the last page you feel not just that you have read a magnificent novel but that you have experienced life itself.' The Timeson The Spare Room 'What Garner offers in these novels is an alternative to the cloying metafiction of the late 20th century and the washed-out realism of the 21st. They are undeniably of their time - the 1970s commitment to the liberating possibilities of sex, drugs and communal living in Monkey Grip, the hangover nursed in the 1980s in The Children's Bach- but they also belong to a literary epoch we think of as long gone, as they earnestly strive to resurrect a modernist art of estrangement.' London Review of Books ...Show more

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Large 9780733630682

There Was Still Love by Favel Parrett

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction | Reading Level: Adult

INDIE AWARD WINNER 2020The profoundly moving new novel from the critically acclaimed and Miles Franklin shortlisted author of PAST THE SHALLOWS and WHEN THE NIGHT COMES. A tender and masterfully told story of memory, family and love. Prague, 1938: Eva flies down the street from her sister. Suddenly a ma n steps out, a man wearing a hat. Eva runs into him, hits the pavement hard. His hat is in the gutter. His anger slaps Eva, but his hate will change everything, as war forces so many lives into small, brown suitcases. Prague, 1980: No one sees Ludek. A young boy can slip right under the heavy blanket that covers this city - the fear cannot touch him. Ludek is free. And he sees everything. The world can do what it likes. The world can go to hell for all he cares because Babi is waiting for him in the warm flat. His whole world. Melbourne, 1980: Mala Li ka's grandma holds her hand as they climb the stairs to their third floor flat. Inside, the smell of warm pipe tobacco and homemade cakes. Here, Mana and Bill have made a life for themselves and their granddaughter. A life imbued with the spirit of Prague and the loved ones left behind. Favel Parrett's deep emotional insight and stellar literary talent shine through in this love letter to the strong women who bind families together, despite dislocation and distance. It is a tender and beautifully told story of memory, family and love. Because there is still love. No matter what. ...Show more

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Large 9781863959551

Act of Grace by Anna Krien

$32.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

The exhilarating debut novel from the award-winning author of Night Games Australian soldier Toohey returns from Baghdad in 2003 with shrapnel in his neck, crippled by PTSD and white-knuckling life. In the Iraq of a decade earlier, aspiring pianist Nasim falls from favour with Saddam Hussein and his ps ychopathic son Uday, triggering a perilous search for safety. In Melbourne as the millennium turns, Robbie, faced with her father's dementia and the family silences that may never find voice, tests boundaries. And in the present day, Gerry seeks to escape his father Toohey's tyranny and heal its wounds. These characters' worlds intertwine across time and place, in a brilliant story of fear and sacrifice, trauma and survival, and what people will do to outrun the shadows. Crossing the frontiers of war, protest and cultural reconciliation, Act of Grace is a meditation on inheritance- the damage that one generation bestows upon the next, and the potential for transformation. This is a searing, powerful and utterly original work by an exceptional Australian writer. It will leave you changed. 'Act of Grace is extraordinary. What a voice Anna has ... visceral, haunting and each word so carefully chosen.' -Catherine Drayton ...Show more

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Large 9781760892746

Football Solution: The How Richmond's Premiership Can Save Australia by George Megalogenis

$22.99 AUD

Category: Australian Non fiction

A sport unlike any other in the world, football has always been Australia's bellwether. But at a time when politics is increasingly conducted like sports - full of one-eyed tribalism, captain's calls and policy dictated by the Newspoll scoreboard - football is the one institution that's more relevant th an ever. And it's Richmond that's out in front of the pack. Before it could win the 2017 premiership, the club had to change how it thought about good leadership. By weaving together the game's conflicted history, a sharp-eyed analysis of Richmond's off-field turbulence and his own love of the Tigers, Megalogenis reveals just how Richmond found a new way to win - and how Australia might do the same. 'Megalogenis has done it again, but with an unexpected twist.' HUGH MACKAY 'A public intellectual who barracks for Richmond argues that the Tigers' 2017 flag contains the seeds of our national resurgence. That's some footy argument . . .' MARTIN FLANAGAN 'Richmond are not yet ahead in the premiership wars, but through inspired leadership, they're streets ahead in the culture wars.' BARRIE CASSIDY 'Manages the incredible feat of igniting hope again for something called Australia. Whatever football code you follow, or even if you don't follow sport at all, I urge you to read this book. It's bracingly sane and beautifully told.' CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS ...Show more

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Large 9781925818116

Empirical by Lisa Gorton

$24.00 AUD

Category: Poetry

The third poetry collection by Lisa Gorton, one of a small number of Australian writers who have won major literary awards for both poetry and fiction. Lisa Gorton began writing Empirical when the Victorian Government of the time threatened to cut an eight-lane motorway through the heart of Royal Park i n Melbourne. She walked repeatedly in the park, seeking to understand how the feeling for place originates, and how memory and landscape fold in and out of each other. The poems exploring this feeling for place are followed by a sequence which recreates the colonial history of Royal Park through the gathering of fragments from newspapers, maps and pictures, a different way of asserting its value, by demonstrating how a landscape can conceal the history of country beneath its layers of time. From this close-up study, in its second part the collection opens out into poems which meditate on ancient statues, Rimbaud's imperial panoramas, the making of Coleridge's poem 'Kubla Khan', the exhibition galleries of Crystal Palace - tracking, through chains of influence, and a phantasmagoric procession of images, the trade between empire, commodities and dreams of elsewhere. Empirical follows a deluxe promenade of thought, in which landscapes are mirrored and refracted in the contemporary Baroque style for which Gorton is renowned. ...Show more

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Large 9781925773293

Bad Debts (Jack Irish #1) by Peter Temple

$19.99 AUD

Category: Crime Fiction & Thrillers | Series: Jack Irish Novels Ser.

Meet Jack Irish, criminal lawyer, debt collector, football lover, turf watcher, trainee cabinetmaker, and one of the best crime characters ever created. When Jack receives a puzzling message from a jailed ex-client he's too deep in misery over Fitzroy's latest loss to take much notice. Next thing Jack knows, the ex-client's dead and he's been drawn into a life-threatening investigation involving high-level corruption, dark sexual secrets, shonky property deals, and murder. With hitmen after him, shady ex-policemen at every turn, and the body count rising, Jack needs to find out what's going on--and fast. The first novel in the iconic Jack Irish series, Bad Debtswas originally published in 1996 and won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Novel. Peter Temple went on to win the Miles Franklin Award in 2010 for Truthas well many other awards and accolades both in Australia and internationally. ...Show more

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Large 9781925322743

Blue Lake: Finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp by David Sornig

$35.00 AUD

Category: Australian Non fiction

In Blue Lake,David Sornig examines how the 8km-square zone to the west of central Melbourne became the city's blind spot. Once a fertile wetland with a large blue saltwater lagoon, it passed through various incarnations- from boneyards and rubbish tips; through the Depression-era Dudley Flats shanty tow n; to the modern-day docks. Through it all, one thing that has persisted is its uncanny, liminal quality.As well as being a social history and a psychogeographic contemplation, Blue Lake is a biography of three specific characters- Elsie Williams, a Bendigo-born singer of Afro-Caribbean origin; Jack Peacock, the king of Dudley Flats? tip-scavenging economy; and Lauder Heinrich Rogge, a German hermit who lived for decades with sixty dogs on a stranded ship. By charting the rises and falls in their individual fortunes, Sornig reveals much about the race and class divides of their times and explores questions about those strange and singular places in the urban fabric where chaos is difficult to contain.In masterful prose, Sornig reveals cracks in the colonial mythology of the ordered vision of progressive, urban Melbourne - a place where identities, both personal and public, have never quite been resolved. In doing so, he encourages readers to look harder at the places they live in - at the streets they walk, the buildings they enter, the empty spaces they pass - and to see in them intricate layers of time and history that have been hidden from view. ...Show more

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Large 9781925344202

The Strays by Emily Bitto

$24.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

The winner of the 2015 Stella Prize has been reformatted in a gorgeous hardback with a jacket cover, just in time for Christmas. On her first day at a new school, Lily befriends one of the daughters of infamous avant-garde painter Evan Trentham. He and his wife are trying to escape the stifling conserv atism of 1930s Australia by inviting other like-minded artists to live and work at their family home. Lily becomes infatuated with this wild, makeshift family and longs to truly be a part of it. As the years pass, Lily observes the way the lives of these artists come to reflect the same themes as their art: Faustian bargains and spectacular falls from grace. Yet it's not Evan, but his own daughters, who pay the price for his radicalism. The Strays is an engrossing story of ambition, sacrifice and compromised loyalties from an exciting new talent. ...Show more

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Large 9781760406943

Resurrection Bay (#1 Caleb Zelic) by Emma Viskic

$19.99 AUD

Category: Crime Fiction & Thrillers

The acclaimed debut thriller from Australia's most exciting new crimewriting talent.   Finalist for the CWA (Crime Writers' Association) Gold Dagger and John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger AwardsThe 2nd Caleb Zelic title, AND FIRE CAME DOWN, will be published October, 2018, and the author is already writi ng a 3rd installment.   Caleb Zelic can't hear you but he sees everything.   CALEB ZELIC IS ON THE HUNT FOR HIS FRIEND'S KILLERCaleb Zelic's childhood friend has been brutally murdered - fingers broken, throat slit - at his home in Melbourne. Tortured by guilt, Caleb vows to track down the killer. But he's profoundly deaf; missed words and misread lips can lead to confusion, and trouble.HE NEVER FORGETS A FACEFortunately, Caleb knows how to read people; a sideways glance, an unconvincing smile, speak volumes. When his friend Frankie, a former cop, offers to help, they soon discover the killer is on their tail. IT MIGHT JUST SAVE HIS LIFESensing that his ex-wife may also be in danger, Caleb insists they return to their hometown of Resurrection Bay. But here he learns that everyone - including his murdered friend - is hiding something. And the deeper he digs, the darker the secrets...? ...Show more

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Large 9781743792780

Last Words: The Hanging of Ronald Ryan by Barry Dickins

$24.99 AUD

Category: Australian Non fiction

From acclaimed playwright and writer Barry Dickins, Last Words is the story of Ronald Ryan, the last man hanged in Australia. Fifty years after his death, questions remain unanswered. Ryan had been found guilty of murdering prison officer George Hodson during an escape from Pentridge Prison with fellow inmate Peter Walker. But did he really fire the bullet that killed Hodson? On 3 February 1967, despite public outrage and vocal protests from wide-ranging community groups, Ryan became the last person to be legally executed in Australia. It was the first time in 20 years that the death penalty had been enforced by the state. Many thought that Ryan's execution was Victorian Premier Henry Bolte's attempt to bolster his chances of winning the upcoming Victorian election, during which he ran a campaign promoting his law-and-order agenda. Last Words is as much about the hanged man as much as it is about the trauma of his family, and the political opportunism behind the decision to proceed with the hanging. In Dickins' lyrical prose he takes readers into the last weeks of Ryan's life and brings to life this infamous man whose personal story has gone undocumented until now. ...Show more

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Large 9781925240832

Our Magic Hour by Jennifer Down

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction | Reading Level: very good

All night Audrey woke again and again, and every so often Nick would be awake, too, and their bodies would shift into new shapes, and once Nick reached for her as if in a panic, and once Audrey thumped to the kitchen half-awake and stuck her head under the tap to drink, and once she turned over to face Nick, who was open-eyed, and they began to kiss in a dream, bodies just coming to, and she saw the dull shadows from the streetlights pass over his face as he came, and he covered her body with his and she felt his breath in her hair, and they held each other, and the whole time they never said a thing. Audrey, Katy and Adam have been friends since high school—a decade of sneaky cigarettes, drunken misadventures on Melbourne backstreets, heart-to-hearts, in-jokes. But now Katy has gone. And without her, Audrey is thrown off balance: everything she thought she knew, everything she believed was true, is bent out of shape. Audrey’s family—her neurotic mother, her wayward teenage brother, her uptight suburban sister—are likely to fall apart. Her boyfriend, Nick, tries to hold their relationship together. And Audrey, caught in the middle, needs to find a reason to keep going when everything around her suddenly seems wrong. Evocative and exquisitely written, Our Magic Hour is a story of love, loss and discovery. Jennifer Down’s remarkable debut novel captures that moment when being young and invincible gives way to being open and vulnerable, when one terrible act changes a life forever. ...Show more

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