Transit Lounge: 71 books

When Mark Heyward first went to Indonesia, to teach at a small school in East Kalimantan, little did he realise how life changing his decision would prove to be. Within three years his Australian life would be behind him and he would be travelling, with fellow adventurers, across remote Indonesian Borneo....

It's 1872 and China still bruised from its defeat in the two Opium Wars sends a group of boys, including seven-year-old Chen Mu, to America to study and bring back the secrets of the West. But nine years on Chen Mu becomes a fugitive and flees to Umberumberka, a mining town in outback Australia. He...

From Carnation Kid and early pop stardom, to LA songsmith and actor, to producer and manager, to Idol judge, to barrister, Mark Holden's memoir is always startlingly honest, a unique portrait of the music and TV industries, of family and ageing in the public eye.In 2006 Mark had a premonition that...

Tell it to the Dog. is an exquisitely written memoir that is at once playful, heartbreaking and affirming. From a Dublin childhood to London, then on to Europe, to Asia and Australia, there is a deep engagement with the world in this book about growing up, about human and animal connectedness, about...

A two year old girl is abandoned on the streets of Ulaan Bataar with a bag of clothes and a note pinned to her: ‘Please take care of me ...'Twelve year old Betty, alone looking after her dying mother, is kidnapped to become a child soldier ...An Australian aid worker finds himself off the tourist...

‘Iran, My Grandfather is a work of recovery, resistance, and affirmation. I think one can say without risk of hyperbole that it is one of the most remarkable texts ever to have been published in Australia.’ John Kinsella Shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2011 ...

From the Sudan to Northern New South Wales, Tarab is an epic, mesmerising tale of high adventure and the search for meaning. Carl Cleves escapes national service in Belgium to live in South Africa at the height of the apartheid era. So begin the adventures and quests, wanderings and narrow escapes, mishaps...

The coast and dreams of being by the water are never far away in Kinsellas surprising stories of Australian small town life. They summon in us both longing and fear at the recollection of our own childhoods, families, friends and upbringings. Flight is a possibility. A boy builds a rocket from 44-gallon...

In the spirit of A. B. Faceys A Fortunate Life, Jack Mercers Hard Times is the true story of the authors amazing adventures. In 1911, growing up in an Ararat pub, he faces the terror of a violent stepfather and a mother who barely acknowledges his existence. But one thing keeps him sane: a plan to run....

‘It’s hard to find the right words to praise this novel. I think we need a whole new critical vocabulary to be invented. Rawson recreates a vanished historical world with utterly convincing characters as well as inhabits the mind of a cephalopod alien and make us feel, in both cases, yes, that’s...

Vasu, a young Indian student of architecture, arrives in Moscow in the late 1960s. He falls in love with Anna, an archaeologist and an accomplished cellist, yet his romanticism about the Soviet Union clashes with her experience. He goes back to India to design a village for a co-operative of coffee farmers,...

Eleven year old Oscar Flowers is on a quest to make sense of the strange world of adults that surround him in the seaside town of Tidetown. The bizarre behaviour of his parents and great aunt impels him to search for the blue tiger, a powerful and beautiful animal that will save his family from themselves....

It is 1997 in San Francisco and Simon and Sarah have been sent on a quest to see America: they must stand at least once in every 25-foot square of the country. Decades later, in an Australian city that has fallen on hard times, Caddy is camped by the Maribyrnong River, living on small change from odd...

In the mid-eighties John McBeath and his partner Sue left Australia for India with the dream to open a European-style pensione in an old Portuguese villa in Goa. After several visits to India they had realised that Goa with its European influences, pristine beaches, and laid-back tropical lifestyle was...