Award Winners

"From the Man Booker Prize-winner, a brilliant and moving novel about celebrity, sexual power, and a daughter's search to understand her mother's hidden truths. Katherine O'Dell is an Irish theatre legend. As her daughter Norah retraces her mother's celebrated career and bohemian life, she delves into long-kept secrets, both her mother's and her own. Katherine began her career on Ireland's bus-and-truck circuit before making it to London's West End, Broadway, and finally Hollywood. Every moment of her life is a star turn, with young Norah standing in the wings. But the mother-daughter romance cannot survive Katherine's past or the world's damage. With age, alcohol, and dimming stardom, her grip on reality grows fitful and, fuelled by a proud and long-simmering rage, she commits a bizarre crime. Her mother's protector, Norah understands the destructive love that binds an actress to her audience, but also the strength that an actress takes from her art. Once the victim of a haunting crime herself, Norah eventually becomes a writer, wife, and mother, finding her way to her own hard-won joy. Actress is finally a book about the freedom we find in our work and in the love we make and keep."

Winner of the Best Debut Fiction, Indie Awards, 2008 and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, 2009.Addition is a stylish, moving love story. Grace is witty, flirtatious and headstrong. She's not a bit sentimental but even so, she may be about to lose track of the number of ways she can fall in love.Grace Lisa Vandenburg counts.The letters in her name (19). The steps she takes every morning to the local cafe (920); the number of poppy seeds on her slice of orange cake, which dictates the number of bites she'll take to finish it.Grace counts everything, because numbers hold the worlds together. And she needs to keep an eye on how they're doing.Seamus Joseph O'Reilly (also a 19, with the sexiest hands Grace has ever seen) thinks she might be better off without the counting. If she could hold down a job, say. Or open her kitchen cupboards without conducting an inventory, or make a sandwich containing an unknown number of sprouts. Grace's problem is that Seamus doesn't count. Her other problem is, he does.Toni Jordan was born in Brisbane. She has worked as a sales assistant, molecular biologist, quality control chemist and marketing manager. In 2006 she received a Varuna Awards master class for Addition. Her second novel, Fall Girl, was released in 2010. Toni now lives in Melbourne where she works as a freelance copywriter.

It's an author's job to create a new world in the pages of a book. But when lines start to blur and reality begins to fade, getting lost in a story can be dangerous - especially if you can't find your way back. Madeleine d'Leon doesn't know where Edward came from. He is simply a character in her next book. But as she writes, he becomes all she can think about. His charm, his dark hair, his pen scratching out his latest literary novel - Edward McGinnity can't get Madeleine out of his mind - softly smiling, infectiously enthusiastic, and perfectly damaged. She will be the ideal heroine for his next book. But who is the author and who is the creation? And as the lines start to blur, who is affected when a killer finally takes flesh?

I had a body once before. I didn't always love it. I knew the skin as my limit, and there were times I longed to leave it. I knew better than to wish for this. This is the story of Yun. It's the story of Adam. Two young people. A familiar chase. But this is not a love story. It's a story of revenge, transformation, survival. Feel something, the body commands. Feel this. But it's a phantom . . . I go untouched. They want their body back. Who are we, if we lose hold of the body? What might we become? The Airways shifts between Sydney and Beijing, unsettling the boundaries of gender and power, consent and rage, self and other, and even life and death. A powerful, inventive, and immersive novel from award-winning author Jennifer Mills.

Acutely observed, evocative collection of short stories from the Man Booker Prize-longlisted author of Unexploded, blending fiction, biography and memoir.Hovering on the border of life and death, these stories form a ground-shifting collection, taking us into history, literature and the hidden lives of iconic figures. In 1920s Nova Scotia, as winter begins to thaw, a woman emerges from mourning and wears a new fur coat to a dance that will change everything. A teenager searches for his lover on a charged summer evening in 2011, as around him London erupts in anger. A cardiac specialist lingers on the edge of consciousness as he awaits a new heart and is transported to an attic room half a century ago. In an ancient Yorkshire churchyard, the author visits Sylvia Plath's grave and makes an unexpected connection across time. On a trip to Brighton, reluctant jihadists face the ultimate spiritual test. And at Charleston, Angelica Garnett, child of the Bloomsbury Group, is overcome by the past, all the beloved ghosts that spring to life before her eyes. Precise, playful and evocative, these exquisitely crafted stories explore memory, the media and mortality, unfolding at the line between reality and fiction. Written with vigorous intelligence and delicate insight, this collection captures the surprising joys, small tragedies and profound truths of existence.

In the summer of 1979, Stefan Hertmans fell in love with a dilapidated house in Ghent. He rescued it from decay and it became his peaceful sanctuary. Decades on, he learns that a bust of Hitler once sat on the mantelpiece, and a war criminal and his family relaxed in its rooms. This shocking discovery sends Hertmans to the archives, where he uncovers the secrets of the house and the atrocities committed by its former owner Willem Verhulst. Drawing on the historical record and interviews with Verhulst’s family, Hertmans reimagines the life of a weak, narcissistic man who climbed the ranks of the SS. Hertmans also uncovers the marital drama that took place in the house: Verhulst’s commitment to the SS was at odds with the outlook of his wife, a deeply religious pacifist. The Ascent is an immersive tale of war, family and individual fate, in which Hertmans demonstrates his mastery at spinning a personal story into an epic narrative.Stefan Hertmans is the prize-winning author of many literary works, including poetry, novels, essays, plays, short stories and a handbook on the history of art. His novel War and Turpentine was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, and was chosen as a book of the year in The Times, the Sunday Times and the Economist, and as one of the ten best books of the year in the New York Times.David McKay is a translator of Dutch literature living in The Hague. He received the 2017 Vondel Prize for his translation of Hertmans’ War and Turpentine.

Chance encounters have life-changing consequences. As the doctor's journey spirals back into his own family story, memories and ghosts shadow the seductions of the present. "Avenue of Eternal Peace", a kaleidoscopic novel of healing and hope, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and filmed as "Children of the Dragon" with Bob Peck and Lily Chen. This is a new, revised edition.

Winner of the Ned Kelly Award for Crime Fiction.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 Debts was originally published in 1996 and won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Novel. Guy Pearce stars as Jack Irish in the ABC telemovies based on the series.Peter Temple is the author of nine novels, including four books in the Jack Irish series. He has won the Ned Kelly Award for Crime Fiction five times, and his widely acclaimed novels have been published in over twenty countries. The Broken Shore won the UK's prestigious Duncan Lawrie Dagger for the best crime novel of 2007 and Truth won the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award, the first time a crime writer has won an award of this calibre anywhere in the world.'One of the world's finest crime writers.' The Times'Having read the new novels of Michael Connelly and Martin Cruz Smith, I have to say that Temple belongs in their company. Australia is a long way off, but this bloke is world-class.' Washington Post'Bad Debts is wonderful, quintessentially Australian stuff, full of authentic, diehard types, old culture cops, backstreet humour and inner-city dialogue you can overhear in the bars of certain hotels, the ones with framed pictures of horses on the walls. it is the genuine article and an absolute pearler of a read.' Australian Book Review'Like his characters, Temple has a spare, funny delivery, and a sharp eye for a target...Temple writes with the urgency of someone who wants to disrupt an official investigation, and his story is kept up like taut wire. Brothers and sisters in crime, worship at the Temple.' Australian'Temple can be as tough as nails, but also displays a wickedly droll sense of humour which, like the work of, say, the American writer Joe R. Lansdale, frequently has the reader holding his sides with laughter even while immersed in some particularly unpleasant scenario...With Bad Debts Temple has created a world-class novel.' Sydney Morning Herald

Surging out of the sea, the Bass Rock has for centuries watched over the lives that pass under its shadow on the Scottish mainland. And across the centuries the fates of three women are linked: to this place, to each other.In the early 1700s, Sarah, accused of being a witch, flees for her life.In the aftermath of the Second World War, Ruth navigates a new house, a new husband and the strange waters of the local community.Six decades later, the house stands empty. Viv, mourning the death of her father, catalogues Ruth’s belongings and discovers her place in the past – and perhaps a way forward.Each woman’s choices are circumscribed, in ways big and small, by the men in their lives. But in sisterhood there is the hope of survival and new life. Intricately crafted and compulsively readable, The Bass Rock burns bright with anger and love.

Mike Amon is a regular teenager. All he wants is to fit in. He wants to sit at the cool bench. He wants to be a star athlete. He wants his first kiss. He also wants his mum to survive. When his mum is suddenly diagnosed with advanced breast and brain cancer, Mike knows it's a long shot, but if he manages to achieve his dreams, maybe it'll give his mum enough strength to beat an incurable disease. In the meantime, he has to live with his African dad whom he doesn't really know, a man who has strange foreign ways - and who Mike doesn't really feel comfortable sharing his teenage desires and deepest fears with. He doesn't even want to think about what it might mean if his mum never comes home from the hospital. Based on his award-winning stand-up show, and the loss of his own mother when he was 12, Matt Okine's coming-of-age novel, Being Black n Chicken and Chips, is a funny, heart-warming, and sometimes surreal look at how young people deal with grief, the loss of loved ones, and becoming an adult - all whilst desperately trying to fit in with the other kids.