Wakefield Press: 112 books

Friedrich Gerstäcker, the most illustrious and prolific of German travel writers, set foot in Australia in March 1851, having walked across the Andes, traipsed the goldfields of California, and sailed over the Pacific in search of new adventures. Gerstäcker found adventures aplenty in Australia....

Travel adventure, love story and tracicomedy, "Exposure" is about wanting too much, choosing too little, and how a person can spend three weeks solid in Los Angeles buying a sleeping bag. Joel Magarey's life would be fine if not for one thing - his brain. Prey to strange compulsions and grandiose visions,...

Rachael Carter, a young nurse, is asked to house-sit by a colleague she barely knows. Dr Cate O'Reilly is travelling to Vietnam with her husband to adopt a baby. Before long the request has changed. The couple need a surrogate. Rachael sees an opportunity

Poems are happening all around us - when you're breezing along on your bike seeing the people, houses, dogs and traffic as they flash by; or when there's a possum on the wall at school and everyone's gathered around; or when the seagulls rise and fall with each ball bowled at the oval. "Tadpoles...

The short stories and one longer story in this collection from Australian literary legend Tom Shapcott range in time and place from Queensland's Sunshine Coast to Adelaide to Slovenia. They encompass contemporary themes of migration and exile, to the traumas of childhood and growing up. Thomas Shapcott...

This witty, moving and accessible collection gathers poems from six previous books, beginning with "Death as Mr Right", which won second prize in the 1982 Anne Elder Award for best first poetry book in Australia. With irony and frankness, Jeri Kroll works

A long-deserted drive-in, waiting for a rerun of the one story that might give it life; a child who discovers his identity in a photograph hidden in his parents' room ... Stephen Orr's stories are happy to let you in, but not out. In "Datsunland", his characters are outsiders peering into...

"I've always said I will write anywhere. You could throw me into prison, cut off my arms and legs and you will find me in the morning with a pen in my mouth writing on the floor." Collected here for the first time are selected letters from the private correspondence of one of Australia's most loved authors,...

Nine-year-old Henry Page is a club-footed, deep-thinking loner, spending his summer holidays reading, roaming the melting streets of his suburb, playing with his best friend Janice and her younger brother and sister. Then one day Janice asks Henry to spend the day at the beach with them. He declines,...

Set in present-day Adelaide, Jetty Road explores the intertwined lives of two sisters, Paula and Evie Haggerty, one a nursing home matron, the other a childcare worker. Past trauma returns to bite Evie; new betrayals await Paula. Their trust in one another is tested as they come to terms with old...

For just over 100 years an institution for the mentally ill has stood on little Peat Island, in the lower Hawkesbury. It was decommissioned in 2010; quite empty now, it remains a locked facility just as it had always been. And eerie. The last residents were dispersed into the wider community. In this,...

It should have been a paradise, but paradise is what you lose, it is what you might have had. An elderly woman who has lived for many years on a tropical island off the Queensland coast with her beachcomber husband waits for help from the mainland. For three harrowing days, alone. He has died, his...

"There were likely to be deserts enough for Goliath to feel quite at home, he said. But that gave rise to a puzzle as to why we would want to go exploring there. Never mind. My task was to record what we saw." By his training as a profilist - a silhouette painter - Ethan Dibble has learned...

"Are you sure you're cut out for this?" The question was put to the author in the fields of girls, commerce, teaching, advertising, film and radio, and in all of them the answer was no. Only in literature did he manage to come good. Incompetence is the leitmotif of "Mug Shots",...