Giramondo: 40 books

This new work by Gerald Murnane is a fictionalised autobiography told in thirty sections, each of which begins with the memory of a book that has left an image on the writers mind. The titles arent given but the reader follows the clues, recalling in the process a parade of authors, the great, the popular,...

Based on Murnane’s own early years growing up in the Victorian country town of Bendigo, Tamarisk Row is an unsparing evocation of an impoverished Catholic childhood in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1974, and out of print for almost twenty years, Tamarisk Row is Murnane’s first novel,...

Weinberger’s essays are like encyclopaedias in miniature, crammed with curious details that make you wonder at the strangeness of creation, and the ability of humans to make it even stranger. Wildlife is a collection which celebrates birds and fish, dogs and flies, ticks and mole-rats, and those...

The Orphan Gunner is an unconventional romance set in bomber command in Lincolnshire during the Second World War.

Jeanne is a young woman from rural France. She’s a knight who wears men’s clothing. The English call her Joan of Arc. Jeanne has led France to victory in epic battles. She hears ghostly voices and has unspeakable desires. The English want to burn her. Her king has abandoned her. Her heart has...

Set in modern-day Mexico City, See You at Breakfast is the story of four characters, leading lives of quiet desperation, who are thrown together by a despicably violent act. Cristina is an optimistic prostitute managing work, police harassment and the demands of the men who fall in love with her such...

Landscape with Landscape is Gerald Murnane’s fourth book, after The Plains, and his first collection of short fiction. When it was first published, thirty years ago, it was cruelly reviewed. ‘I feel sorry for my fourth-eldest, which of all my book-children was the most brutally treated in its...

Tom Chos collection of fictions and fantasies is all about morphing and transformation. Through the shape-shifting, we follow the narrator on his surreal adventures, which include dirty dancing with Johnny Castle, a rambunctious encounter with TVs Dr Phil, a job as Whitney Houstons bodyguard and another...

This collection of essays leads into the eccentric imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing.

The Bath Fugues is a meditation on melancholy and art, in the form of three interwoven novellas, centred respectively on an ageing art forger; a Portuguese poet, opium addict and art collector; and a doctor, who has built an art gallery in tropical Queensland. These characters are tied by more than...

John Hughes enters deep into the world of his imagination, giving voice to the twenty-one writers and artists who have left their traces there. In story-like essays written in the style of his heroes, the effect is like ventriloquy.

Blindness and Rage is a novel told in 34 cantos, somewhat in the manner of Pushkin’s great Russian novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. Castro’s hero Lucien Gracq is a townplanner from Adelaide who is writing a book-length poem, Paidia. Doubtful of its reception, he travels to Paris to join a literary...

This is a novel about mothers and daughters, about the way the hidden past plays itself out in the present, and the conflicts between professional commitment and the responsibilities of family life. The story is told by a young woman, Martine, who translates the emotional distance she senses in her mother,...

Explores the nature of grief and mourning, illness and separation, language and silence, and the power of vision and memory to counteract time.