Form/Genre: Literary fiction

'A lighthouse. A weather station, thousands of miles away. For six months. I drank steadily. With alcohol it all made sense.'It's the Bicentennial year and for Gordon - failed writer and bottleshop boy - it seems his life is going nowhere. It's time to escape. From his overcrowded house, from Bri...

A man arrives at a house on the coast to write a book. Separated from his lover and family and friends, he finds the solitude he craves in the pyrotechnic beauty of nature, just as the world he has shut out is experiencing a cataclysmic shift. The preoccupations that have galvanised him and his w...

Jenny is unloved, unemployable and emotionally unfiltered. Her long-suffering friends seem sick of her and whilst her social media portrays her life as a bed of roses, it is more of a dying succulent.Adults is what you want it to be. A misadventure of maturity, a satire on our age of self-promoti...

It started in Lake Como, where it should have ended …Connie McGabe longs for the summers where she leads tours across Europe. But it’s on the glamorous shores of Lake Como that she is truly swept away, when Jared, a much younger man, falls for her.Despite resisting his advances, Connie finds that...

When Indigenous lawyer Jasmine decides to take her mother, Della, on a tour of England's most revered literary sites, Jasmine hopes it will bring them closer together and help them reconcile the past.Twenty-five years earlier, the disappearance of Jasmine's older sister devastated their tight-kni...

Brought to you by Penguin. Nat, a 47 year-old veteran of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, believes his years as an agent runner are over. He is back in London with his wife, the long-suffering Prue. But with the growing threat from Moscow Centre, the office has one more job for him. Nat is ...

Noah is only days away from his first trip back to Nice since he was a child when a social worker calls looking for a temporary home for Michael, his eleven-year-old great-nephew. Though he has never met the boy, he gets talked into taking him along to France. This odd couple, suffering from jet ...

When Primrose makes an unplanned detour into a tumbledown suburban golf course called Whistles, she has no idea that the past would come rushing back at her, putting every detail of her life squarely into focus.At 36, her marriage is teetering due to illness and infidelity. A visit from her comma...

With more than two million copies sold around the world, The Alchemist has established itself as a modern classic, universally admired.Paulo Coelho’s masterpiece tells the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as ...

Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murder...

Life isn’t always like it appears in the movies. In 1952, Irene Sandle takes her young daughter to Motueka. Irene was widowed during the war and is seeking a new start and employment in the tobacco fields. There, she finds the reality of her life far removed from the glamour of the screen.Can the...

Fiona Kidman's early stories about New Zealand women's experiences scandalised with their vivid depictions of the heartbreaks and joys of desire, illicit liaisons and unconventional love. Her writing made her a feminist icon in the early 1980s and she has since continued to tell the realities of ...

Danny – Dhananjaya Rajaratnam – is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, denied refugee status after he has fled from his native Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he’s been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan gir...

A grandson tries to learn the family story. But what kind of story is it? Is it a prison memoir, about the grandfather imprisoned without charge or trial by a revolutionary government? Is it an oral history of the grandmother left behind to look after the children? Or is it a love story? A detect...

Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. And although J...

Could you take in your best friend’s child, even if it risked destroying your own family? Jo had thought that her life – and her heart – was full. With a busy job, a husband and a teenage daughter who is going off the rails, keeping her life running smoothly had already felt hard enough.But now J...

Recalling Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure and complexity, Anything is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others. Anything is Possible tells the story of the inhabitants of rural, dusty Amgash...

From the outside, the Delaneys appear to be an enviably contented family. Even after all these years, former tennis coaches Joy and Stan are still winning tournaments, and now they've sold the family business they have all the time in the world to learn how to 'relax'. Their four adult children a...

Leaving has always come naturally to Eva Elliott. The daughter of a pilot, she spent her childhood leaving schools and cities; now an adult, she enjoys the thrill of saying goodbye much more than the butterflies of a first smile or kiss. There's so much more potential in walking away, and Eva has...

Uniquely, her last two novels, Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies, both won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.In this new collection of ten stories, all her gifts of characterisation, observation and intelligence are once again fully on display. With settings ranging from Saudi Arabia to...