Transit Lounge: 71 books

Jane Carswell began her working life at Pegasus Press shortly after its audacious publication of Janet Frame’s novel Owls Do Cry, and years later she went on to write an award-winning memoir called Under the Huang Jiao Tree: Two journeys in China.The road between one book and the other was paved...

Nestled on a windswept coastline, life in Tidetown is quiet and assured. But after a mysterious and mystical black-skinned slave is shipwrecked on its shores time-honoured traditions are unsettled. As events unravel the unfinished business of the barbaric Fishcutter murder comes back to haunt the...

Poems first written in Chinese but now presented in both Chinese and English, Self Translation is arguably Ouyang Yus most lyrical and resonant collection of poetry to date. The verse inhabits China and Australia in spirit and the natural world in both nations. Mellow and beautiful, yet questioning of...

This is the story of two flawed eccentrics. Everything they do subverts their firm intention of keeping up appearances. They meet just after the war in liberated Paris but they cannot quite free themselves from the many strings attached to them the old aunts, the sisters, the cousins, the nuns and...

William ‘Billy’ Sing was born in 1886 to an English mother and Chinese father. He and his two sisters were brought up in Clermont and Proserpine, in rural Queensland. He was one of the first to enlist in 1914 and at Gallipoli became famous for his shooting prowess. In his new novel, Billy Sing,...

Kurt Stocker's Swiss childhood is dominated by strict and god-fearing parents. He enters a seminary with the intent of becoming a priest and making his parents proud of him, but struggles to adapt. Leaving this vocation behind, he marries Liesl and they eventually emigrate to Australia.Decades later...

David Cohen takes suburban life and turns it into a warped comedy with a body count, letting weirdness in, compellingly, irresistibly, until our sense of what's real is flickering on and off like a dodgy fluoro tube.' - Nick EarlsHideaway Self Storage, located just off Brisbane’s M1, is in decline....

Three people travel to Bali for very different reasons. Marla is well read in Balis culture; she distrusts false ideologies, orientalism and tourism. To her surprise she finds the echoes of a golden age and a passionate lover. Nelson, a young woman from Sydney returns in the hope of reuniting with her...

Michael and Majorie Madigan refuse to be interviewed by biographer Sinclair Hughes for his new book Inside the Lion's Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan. This is not surprising as Gilbert is Marjorie's ex- husband and Michael's mostly absent father.In Roger Averill's brilliantly conceived new...

Samuel and Morgan are twin brothers separated by several oceans. Once, when they were children together, they shared not only a family and a childhood, but a secret imaginary world that had a language of its own: Nahum. But that was decades ago: before Morgan became a wanderer whose only contact with...

The last bushrangers in Australian history, James and Patrick Kenniff, were at the height at their horse thieving operation at turn of the 20th century. In One, troops cannot pull the Kenniff Gang out of the ranges and plains of Western Queensland the brothers know the terrain too well, and the locals...

‘Pitch perfect. Subtly powerful stories that ring hauntingly true.’ - Steven Carroll, Winner of the Miles Franklin AwardIn this luminous book of new stories, John Kinsella drops us seamlessly into the worlds of men, women and children at pivotal moments in their lives. In the title story, a husband...

A brave new novel that sensitively explores one woman's experience of sexual violence and the silencing of those who feel compelled to speak out.What happens when a young woman enters a city apartment early morning, with two footballers? Jordi Spence is sixteen years old and lives in outer Melbourne....

In an increasingly divided and intolerant world, What the Light Reveals is a beacon: a novel that brilliantly captures the sometimes devastating consequences of individual belief. Conrad is falsely accused of passing military secrets to the Russians. His life and that of his family is turned upside...