Wakefield Press: 112 books

Eden Carmichael, a politician, is found dead in a brothel on a hot afternoon. Sandra Mahoney mulls over a demeaning photograph showing Carmichael in a dress and blonde wig. When a lobby group asks her to investigate a company producing filters for the internet, Mahoney is surprised to discover a trail...

Suicide, or murder? Newly arrived in Papua, where even the luscious vegetation conspires with the bureaucrats to bewilder her, Stella Warwick is determined to prove her husband did not take his own life. Defying the patronising concern of officials, she ventures deep into the jungle, striding ever closer...

"Marian couldn't see the woman's eyes behind her glasses, and was filled with panic. That bosom was not for comfort. Not for Marian. She, Marian, was here so that this woman, this psychologist, could expose her failure to be a proper mother." Her son's actions shatter Marian's life. As the days pass...

"Jumpers," McCallum was saying. "Jumpers are - well, in my experience jumpers are always badly disturbed. They choose to jump because it's so violent." Niall Howley has been spending night after night playing an interactive computer game when he's found dead at the bottom of the...

Imagine visiting Florence to study Italian and being swept off your feet by a charming chef who takes you speeding through the moonlit hills in his Fiat to visit the village of his childhood, and into the kitchens of his Tuscan restaurants where he teaches you to cook. So begins "Amore and Amaretti",...

Global traveller Lydia Laube had out her map again. Where could she go next? Her eye fell on one place she hadn't visited - Laos, the Land of a Million Elephants. After enduring a close call with Thai immigration officials, Lydia made it into Laos, and discovered a people and land easy to love. Travelling...

"I do not think that I believe in ghosts, but just for this morning, just for the time it will take to ramble through this quiet city under clouds the colour of tin, or of pigeons' wings, I am going to believe in them." Ordinary lives are revealed as extraordinary, as Carol Lefevre traces the stories...

The Vanished Land is the Western District of Victoria stripped of its identity, its social elite of grazing dynasties departed for their own reasons. The melancholic exodus has increased recently as the myriad pressures of holding inherited land have become intolerable in a nation never intimidated...

Who else but Lydia Laube would climb the Great Wall of China waving a pink parasol while riding a donkey? In "Slow Boat to Mongolia" Lydia tells of her travels by ship, train and bone-shaking bus through Indonesia and China on her way to fabled Outer Mongolia. Lydia learns to use chopsticks...

Ken Clezy, AM OBE, is a surgeon whose vocation has taken him many places, not all of them safe. When three colleagues were shot dead at a Yemen mission hospital he escaped only because he had gone home for breakfast. In Port Moresby, where Ken Clezy was the first professor of surgery at the University...

Artist and writer Stephanie Radok possesses a unique international perspective. For over twenty years she has written about and witnessed the emergence of contemporary Aboriginal art and the responses of Australian art to global diasporas. In "An Opening: Twelve love stories about art", Stephanie Radok...

"Even the free whisky had gone, and the mini-bar gins. What else were a couple of girls down on their luck supposed to do?" Teri Louise Kelly and her partner in crime, Jo Buck, arrive penniless in New Zealand from the UK on the hunt for a "better way of life". Instead they find a situation vacant ad,...

Grab the popcorn, sit back and let the story of Australian literature roll ... From Jean-Francois Vernay, "A Brief Take on the Australian Novel" offers a sweeping view of Australian writing since colonialism. Written from an outsider's perspective, this single-authored overview will appeal...

Renowned historian Jill Roe, whose grandparents were early settlers of South Australia's west coast, revisits her mid-century childhood in what was one of Australia's most remote regions. Rhythms of work and play were punctuated by moments - the annual show, a visit from young Queen Elizabeth - that...