Carrots and Jaffas tells the story of two red-headed identical twins whose oneness is ruptured when one of them is kidnapped. Their startling intimacy is both a strength and a fault line in their being, and once separated, their individuality emerges. In the course of this exhilarating domestic tale set in Melbourne and the Flinders Ranges, the reader encounters the twins' parents – emotional, scripture-quoting Luisa and calm Bernard – a ...
MODERN INTERIORS rummages around in the back rooms and passageways of the family. When her husband dies, Philippa Finemore, formerly a pillar of the Establishment, is determined to broaden her life. She sells the family mansion, acquires a lover and new friends, and devises new plans for the family money. Her adult children, rather than welcoming her new direction, are unrestrained in their condemnation of what they perceive as gross irresponsib ...
Gracious Living plunges into the excesses of the 1980s. Adrian Dadswell, an entrepreneur, is the owner of a holiday resort that boasts everything from an indoor golf range to a fake rain forest. Adrian has a former wife and a disabled daughter who, together with their friends, live very differently from Adrian and his white-shoe brigade. It is these women – young and old, married and single, lesbians and mothers – who come to dominate the novel. ...
Alexander Otto has it all – eminence as a surgeon, admiring colleagues, a loving family. Yet from the opening lines of this modern tragedy, he is a man on the run. What secrets lie beneath the successful veneer of Alexander Otto's life? Edwina Frye is Otto's biographer, she is also having an affair with him. As she writes the official biography, she writes a parallel life of Alexander which develops into a disturbing fiction of betraya ...
Facing the Music explores the dark side of ambition and the ambiguous passions which surround creativity. Duncan Bayle is a successful composer whose genius has faltered. He blames his problems on the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of his daughter, Anna, whom he has long regarded as his muse. Duncan believes that if he is to work again, Anna must return. But she had good cause to leave and even better reason to stay away. ...
The Poet ' is a tale of obsession, art, and the thresholds between day and night. Manfred is a nondescript insurance clerk, inflexibly honest and imbued with a profound sense of order. He is also a prolific poet, but has never tried to publish – until now. The novella traces the events and experiences that befall Manfred in the wake of a single moment's carelessness, a mistake that will change his life. He enters a maze he must nego ...
Charlie Lansdowne's life is going nowhere… fast. Trapped at home with his eccentric father, Roger, and his stroke-affected grandfather, Frank, he finds life a daily exercise in dysfunction as three generations of men strive to get along. But when Charlie meets the volatile and tempestuous Maxine – a surfer girl who works at the local abattoir – his life goes supernova. Friendships implode, passions ignite and death comes stalking in the nig ...
In 2004 the author found a little diary of 386 pages written by a 62-year-old man in a nursing home. This story is inspired by that diary.<br /> <br />E=mc2? Jack Smythe thinks Einstein is wrong and he has a theory to prove it. But he's no physicist. Instead, he's been a homeless kid, a palmreader, a cosmic theorist, a father of two (who probably aren't his) and a devoted companion to his sister Kitty who has her own d ...
Southern England. August 1936. An artefact from the dark ages – a wolf carved in jet black – is stolen from the archaeology department of St Matthew's College. A man is murdered in an antique store.<br /> <br />Historian George Haye translates two eighth-century documents for the investigating police, and is very soon nearly murdered himself. What is it about the documents? Aren't they just letters from one Englishman to an ...
